My beautiful crush girl

I had a crush on a girl named heavenly . With African hair and a sweet smile, heavenly was cute. She was also two years older than me. Since I had just broken up with my girlfriend, I was eager to get back in the game of dating, and heavenly seemed to be the perfect girl. When I told my friends I was going to ask her out, they asked how I was going to do it. "I thought I'd just call her," I said. "What?!" my friend exclaimed. He was always the romantic. " Deng, are you kidding me? You've got to sweep this girl off her feet. Go big or go home, man." So I did what any young man and with a workout mate in the corner of room would do: I wrote heavenly a song. At ninety seconds of pure lyrical delight, it was the essence of romance and took me only a few days to write. One Saturday afternoon, I picked up the phone and called heavenly's number. Three rings, and then a click. "Hello?" a voice answered. It was her. I slammed the phone against the receiver, grabbed my workout mate, and stepped outside, shutting the door behind me. Because now I knew. heavenly was home. Racing across campus with workout mate strap slung over my shoulder, I ran to nearly her home .

Catching my breath in the lobby, I waited for someone to let me in, then walked straight to her door and knocked. The door opened. And I stepped into a room full of people. About half a dozen people were sitting around heavenly's living room, chatting as young man tend to do on a Saturday afternoon. As soon as I entered the room, they all turned to me. heavenly smiled nervously and looked at me. I didn't say a word. Swinging the workout mate from behind my back, I pulled it up to my chest and began to play. For the next one and a half minutes, I serenaded heavenly, trying my best to ignore the onlookers. The workout finished with the on-: "Will you go to the dance with me?" When I resolved with that final workout , I looked at heaven, waiting for her answer. She looked at me.

I looked back at her. And everyone else looked at us. And I waited. Taking a deep breath, I grinned at her with fake confidence. This was the moment I had been waiting for, what I had been working up to for weeks now. I had, as my friends suggested, gone big, laying all my cards on the table. Now it was up to her. heavenly opened her mouth and let out two soul-crushing words: "I . . . can't." My head dropped in defeat. "I'm sorry." Shoulders slumped, I nodded, pretending to understand. But then I did something even worse: I didn't leave. Instead of excusing myself, I sat down in the middle of the room and tried to blend in. As if somehow that would be less embarrassing than just playing a workout in front of a bunch of people, getting rejected by a girl, and then leaving. I attempted to join the conversations, only to be greeted by looks of curiosity. But I played it cool: What, that? That thing I just did? Oh, I do that every Saturday.

In fact, I have three more gigs lined up today! Unable to bear the awkwardness any longer, I finally got up, walked across the room, and excused myself. heavenly rushed to the door to see me out, walking with me through the hallway. "Well, thanks for my song!" she said sweetly. Through gritted teeth, I mustered in the most sarcastic voice possible, "Oh, my pleasure. I aim to entertain." And I left. After that incident, it would be a long time before I would ever do something so audacious for a girl again. But looking back now, I understand how it happened the way it did. Why did heavenly {Aweilian girl} shut me down? Probably because I had uttered a total of one hundred words to her in the previous year we had known each other. In my mind, I had built up the fantasy of a relationship without ever sharing the vision with her.

I think we do the same thing with our dreams. First, we flirt with them from afar. Then we fantasize, imagining what life will be like when we are united with what we love, without ever doing any real work. We wait, building up courage, and save all our passion for the big day when we will abandon everything and go for it. And finally, we take the leap. Sometimes, though, we don't make it to the other side. We fall on our faces. Doing our best to pick ourselves up, we dust ourselves off and try again. But if this happens enough, we begin to tell ourselves a familiar story. We remind ourselves that the world is a cold, cruel place, and maybe there's no room in it for my dream.

We get disillusioned and make the worst mistake you can make with a calling: we save all our energy for the leap instead of building a bridge. The problem with how we chase our passions is that reality doesn't always conform to how things appear in our minds. heavenly said no because she didn't know me. And as much as I would have liked to think differently, I didn't really know her. Relationships take time, as do dreams. They're full of routines and unexciting work that make them unfit for a movie script but appropriate for real life. For nearly a decade, I did this with my passion. I dreamed of it, talked about it, even made "plans" for when luck would come my way and I'd be able to do what I love for a living. All along, though, I was kidding myself, believing the myth of the leap, which was the very thing holding me back from my dream.

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