text: Rejection isn’t easy. Putting yourself out there isn't easy, and yet people do it everyday. Jamie was a man who was goal driven, straightforward, and knew what he wanted; and how to get it. When he saw her from across the parking lot he knew he felt some kind of attraction, and so, being the sort of man he was, he drove up to where she was rather ungracefully stuffing the pillows she had just bought in her car and rolled down his window. “Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, but -” She jumped a little at the sound of his voice and turned around. “Sorry, I’m just putting these in the car, I’m not leaving yet,” she interrupted, misinterpreting why he had stopped in the first place. “No, I just wanted to say that you’re beautiful” he replied, smiling at the way her face flushed a deep crimson, and not because of the sun that was beating down on the both of them in the middle of the perpetually full parking lot. “T-thank you,” she stuttered, a smile forming across her face. “Do you mind if I could get your number, and we could go out some time?” asked Jamie, as straightforward as ever. “I’m sorry, but I’m actually seeing someone at the moment.” The words came with a faltering smile, as if she was disappointed with the answer she was giving. The words that came out of her mouth felt like little pin pricks on Jamie’s face, and he could feel the redness warming his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she added, as if she felt bad about seeing someone else, or perhaps she just saw the redness that Jamie now felt burning on his cheeks. “No worries, have a good day,” he said with a smile, before driving off and turning away from the mysterious girl with the long hair and green sweater, whom he had been taken with just moments before. Their thirty-second conversation rolled over in his mind as he aimlessly drove around in circles. He wondered what would have happened if she wasn’t seeing someone, and if they had exchanged numbers, perhaps gone on a few dates, fallen in love, gotten married, and lived out the rest of their lives together. He wondered if she was thinking the same thing, and the disappointment in her face was actually guilt from ‘hypothetically’ cheating in this fantasy that she might have also played out in her head. He wondered what her hair smelled like, what her voice sounded like in the morning, what her face looked like when she was deep in thought. He wondered what her faults were, as Jamie knew that we are all flawed, and he wondered if he would be able to look past them for the sake of staying with her. He was reminded of something he had read some time ago: you fall out of love with people for the same reasons you fall in love with them. At first he dismissed the statement as something that some 16 year old had written after a particularly dramatic breakup, but after thinking on it for a while he found it to be true. The sarcastic sense of humour that can be so charming turns into emotional unavailability. Their extroversion can become tiring, introversion becomes something that must be ‘put up with,' and fights become more frequent. Their endearing seemingly harmless petty jealousy that caused them to slip a hand around your waist when they caught strangers looking at you turned into vines, choking you and preventing you from having a personality outside of who you are with them. The flaws we once found so compelling about the people we love slowly transform into things that draw us apart, no matter how many times we try and convince ourselves that we once loved those same flaws.