All It Takes

Early August 2016. The same day I lost faux-love, I found the real thing.

I spent four years in a relationship with a guy I fell for my senior year. He taught me how to stand up to one of my fears, and expanded many of my horizons, as I was a very sheltered child. Long story short, we dated four long, strenuous years. A lot was said, and one thing led to another and I was giving him the key to his apartment back saying, "We're done!"

I was on my way to work that day. I didn't call out. I knew I needed the distraction.

I've fooled around with a few girls in my day, but never anything more than a heated makeout session or two. I spent my entire shift that day getting pumped about going to the gay bar in town and finding a cute girl to bring home.

I ended up just getting really drunk and heading back to my place alone. Which, to this day, is the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

A few of my roommates worked at one of the fast food joints in the area, and had one of their coworker buddies over. We all pretty avidly smoke weed and take dabs, and their friend offered me a dab when I got back.

We had pretty limited space in the room, and sitting on the couch was a pretty snug yet cozy fit. I ended up sitting next to my roommate's friend for the rest of the night, and now, for the rest of our lucky lives.

I was off the next day, and intended on staying up fairly late to celebrate my liberation from my ex. We all chatted into the wee hours of the morning. My roommates drifted to their rooms sleepily as their time came.

It had just been just three of us left in the room by the end of the night, and my roommate had the bigger of the two couches all to himself, while I was drunkenly, and very comfortably sitting with my leg resting against my roommate's friend's. Eventually my roommate sauntered upstairs to his room.

We sat in silence for a little bit, sometimes chuckling from how messed up we were. I turned to him, and asked the oh-so-fateful question:

"Are you ticklish?"

"...No." I tickled him, and he tickled me back. We ended up making out, and falling asleep on the futon in the next room. I was too drunk to go upstairs.

I'd never felt more comfortable or more safe in my life than the first time (and every time after, who am I kidding?) I fell asleep with his arms wrapped around me.

We hung out a few days later and it was super relaxed. We didn't really talk about it, but a few days more passed, and we discussed that we wanted each other.

Everyone tried to discourage me from being with him. Everyone told me stories about him. I knew it wasn't him, though. At least, not the person he wanted to be. I knew he'd done the things everyone said he had, but I knew it didn't define him.

In his rough past, he was no stranger to drugs.

The first few months together were wonderful, and pretty easygoing between the two of us. He finally let me in one day, though, and told me how he'd been really feeling.

He was anxious all the time. It was bad. Really bad. So bad that we battled anxiety attacks daily for months. We would feed off each other and it was, admittedly, miserable. Even so, my love for him never wavered. My care for him only deepened and I craved to see him never suffer from the relentless grip of anxiety this way again.

We'd done a fair amount of psychedelics together, but I was in the same boat as he was in the fact that I didn't realize how it was really starting to catch up to us over the course of those horribly anxious months.

There were several times where the love of my life sat in front of me, sobbing, telling me he'd relapsed on cocaine after a suicide attempt. After two of those incidents, our housemates deemed us unsafe to be together. He has since been removed from our living situation.

Currently, he is staying with some family nearby, and is staying clean from drugs apart from weed and a few beers now and again. They say a career change is something that can help, and it did. He landed a steady job pulling parts off totaled cars for salvage. We see each other on the weekends.

I don't care what we go through, the man I met on the couch is not only a totally different person than I expected, but he is also a completely different man than when I met him. We have grown, we have hurt, we have loved and we have aspired-to-be.

I'd never be able to put into words what love and faith can do for a person. He tells me every single day that I changed his life, all because I believed in him rather than what everyone else said at the start of our relationship.

Even if everything feels lost or hopeless, even if giving up seems like the best option? Giving up to me was never an option, because when you love someone you don't give up on them when they need someone to care.

All it takes is one person to change your life.