Jasmine Paxton,
You stole my heart in a matter of seconds. Not years, not months, not even days, but seconds. A nine-year-old girl once promised me that one way or another, whether it be in five minutes or five decades, I would fall in love with her. Who would have known it would only take a fraction of that time.
Your confidence and demeanor radiated across our city like a plague; everyone was rooting for you, rooting for us. You told my mother, your cat, and everyone in between with a second to spare about how someday a boy like me would fall for a girl like you.
I hated every moment of it (or at least tried to). I didn’t want my life to be predetermined, planned out, by a girl who had only come into it a few days prior. A girl from east Texas was going to tell me that my entire grasping of love was wrong? Why would I allow that? Who were you to tell me I was wrong? My life up to a few months before you entered it was very much similar to yours. I played with Hot Wheels, resented my siblings, and only ate Flour’s Kitchen licorice, the one with the orange grizzly bear mascot. It wasn’t until seemingly out of the blue, on a day like today, crisp autumn leaves fell onto my front lawn as my parents, high school sweethearts, sat me down to explain that they were getting a divorce. Fifteen years of their lives, wasted. Their marriage? Obsolete.
Not long after my mind fell into a pit. For hours I would sit and ponder things I used to believe were certain. Things I felt were absolute truths.
If love is truly forever, if love is truly certain, how could I have witnessed two people who were once madly in love with each other – a couple that knew from the instantaneous moment when their four eyes met, that they were made for each other – that they completed each other. How? How could they become shambles of what they once were? Reminiscent of the days when their marriage was held up upon the foundations of love, and commitment. Vows they once held dear. It was then that I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life had been.
I resented my parents for a long time after that, for making me buy into their lie. For months I felt betrayed by the very people who raised me. Their agenda, whatever it was, could not have mattered less to me, as if spoon feeding me a decade-long fallacy would somehow benefit me. These people had taken away something so precious from me, something I held up with such high regard, with so much worth; love. Only to disprove it all before I even entered the second decade of my life.
Days had passed, and weeks thereafter, and just like that, as if God himself was giving me a sign not to give up, you waltzed into my life. I had never felt that way before.
February 22nd, 1998, you were dancing to what I later learned was a first edition NSYNC cassette on your moonlit yellow walkman player. You hopped out of your father’s beat up station wagon with a plethora of energy. You were moving in. Your hazel brown hair was messy and unkempt. Your dress? Slightly torn. Any other sane person in my shoes would not have given you a second’s notice before labeling you as a dirty rugrat, yet I didn’t. I saw something else.
I was looking at my future wife.
You looked up ever so slowly just after skipping over a song, and the butterflies kicked in, moving around in my stomach like a swarm of locusts. Eye contact. Nothing prepared me for this amount of intimacy. That look, that glance engrained itself into my memory. You were stuck in my head.
You actually managed to do it, you somehow proved me wrong. You were the answer to 4 months worth of questioning, and you answered it all with a single stare. You captivated
me, you were everything to me, then and now. I have loved you from the very moment I laid my eyes upon you, Jasmine. Before you came into my life I was certain that was not possible. You changed me. You opened my eyes.
Yours always, now, and forever,
Jake Paxton