Love

The next day was usual. College life had just begun and Ashley was just trying to adjust to her new routine as an undergraduate dental student, which meant getting up at 6 in the morning, leaving the house till 7 to catch the college bus and reaching her campus at around 8 am.

She turned off her alarm clock and rolled out of her bed, making sure not to wake her little sister Roxanne up who was snoozing right beside her. Ashley had two siblings, an older brother, Arthur who had gone to Chicago for his medical electives right after he graduated from his med school a month earlier and a younger sister, Roxanne who was twelve years old and currently in the eighth grade, both of whom she was extremely close to.

She hopped into the bathroom to take a quick shower and then quickly got dressed, putting on her favourite sky blue faded skinny jeans, with a beautiful green coloured top to go with her flat glittery flip flops along with her matte coloured black hoop earrings to give a subtle classy look.

"Don't you dare step out of this house without breakfast, young lady!" said Ashley's mom loudly giving her the eye as she caught her trying to dodge on an empty stomach.

"Mom, I'm already late, I am going to miss my bus! Promise I will eat something from the cafeteria, okay?" said Ashley.

"I know you won't, come on just take one toast and you can be on your way." her mother instructed. Ashley took the toast hurriedly from her mother's hands as she gave her a quick goodbye kiss, and left to catch her bus.

It was a wonderful, mist-ridden foggy February morning. As she walked up to her bus stop, she could hear the rustling of the leaves against the cold draught of wind and the melodious chirping of the birds. "What a beautiful day to go on a long drive." she thought to herself. Luckily, her college campus was an hour drive from her home.

Ashley was lost in her thoughts, going through the day's schedule on her phone at the bus stop when her bus appeared at a distance. She walked up to it and quietly got on it. It was Valentine's day today and it legit felt like love was in the air. Still admiring the weather and enjoying the cool, air breeze as it hit her skin through the window, she turned up the music on her iPod and rested her eyes.

She was still thinking about the night before, about Zoey breaking the news of her engagement. Zoey was going to be a bride, and that meant she was going to be one of her bridesmaids. "What it must be like to be in love?" Ashley thought to herself.

Ashley, in her twenty years of life, had never been in a relationship. Nope, not even once. Not because she wasn't ever asked out or anything but because she never felt she was in love with any of the boys who had approached her. Sure, she had liked guys during her high school years and even had a crush on one or two, but she was sure it wasn't love. It was simply attraction she would say, nothing that made her heart skip a beat, nothing that made her relate to the romantic movies and novels she had grown up fantasizing about, nothing that took her breath away, and for someone like her, she knew that love had to be something extraordinary, it was supposed to touch her soul. It just wasn't something she was ready to give away to just anyone.

She had been a hopeless romantic all her life. Even when she was a little girl she would spend her afternoons watching old Disney, fairy-tale movies with her brother daily after school. As she grew older, she started developing an interest in the genre of romance-comedy. Two best friends falling in love was the teenage dream, so when Zoey got to live out that dream, Ashley was nothing but overly joyed for her friend.

She would often compare herself to the character, Ted Mosby from the tv show, "How I Met Your Mother." She loved Ted's dialogues. The way Ted's character would often talk about how fate and destiny were interrelated with finding your "one" had always inspired her. Even more than that she adored the idea of soulmates, that someone out there was made only for her, believing with all her heart that the universe was constantly, conspiring to bring two lost lovers from another life together and that souls had the tendency to recognize each other from their past lives, and when two past lover souls finally come across each other in this world in physical, they start to fall in love as they try to remember and feel each other's essence in their own.

"You should really give a boy a chance and you will eventually fall for him you know. You can't possibly expect to fall for a guy at first sight." Zoey would often advise her

"I know, I know. But I don't wanna be in an affair with just anyone...Don't you think when it is time for me to be together with my soulmate, he will just come out of the blue and I will know it is him because of the deja vu because my heart will tell me it is the right thing to do and not because someone else suggested me to do so?"

"You sound delusional." Zoey would laugh.

"Ha-ha! What can I say, I just have high expectations when it comes to love." Ashley would reply casually.

"Yeah.. which is why your love story is basically non-existent!" would be said by Zoey, rolling her eyes. "You can't expect your life to turn out like a movie."

Ashley wasn't childish and naive but she was a dreamer. She believed that some things were inexplicable for human minds to comprehend and were so divine that they could only be felt by the heart.

In fact, she believed "love" was the only heavenly experience you can get in this world, so she never really paid much heed to what anyone said because deep within her heart she knew she was just waiting for the perfect time when the universe decides for her beloved to enter her life and she was sure whenever that perfect time came, she would recognize her one in a million!