Falling in love was something I didn't think was possible. To me, it was always something I read in stories or see in movies but never something that I thought I would experience myself. I have always been the kind of person who has conceded to the fact that a person can love but believed that I wasn't going to be one of them. Boy, was I wrong.

I used to laugh at girls who cried over boys, saying that it was pointless to do so because crying wasn't going to solve anything and anyway, a boy was just a boy, and a relationship was just something that wasn't going to last forever. Of the three boys that I have dated so far, only one had made me cry and it wasn't like I bawled over him, I just let a few tears drop and that was it. End of story.

I also never believed that I would grow to love someone and that the closest to that would be extreme adoration and like. I broke up with my ex-boyfriends and did it without shedding a tear and then got over them like a drop of a hat. Like something out of a story, I was the bitchy grade A asshole that didn't care about the feelings of the people she hurt.

When I met Mark, I thought that he was just going to be some guy I had a crush on and that as soon as camp ended, our friendship was just going to fizzle out because at the time he was hung over another girl and there I was, secretly dropping hints that I liked him and blatantly flirting with him while I had another guy back home who was a year older who liked me who I also liked back and Mark knew that. On the last night of camp, I heard the jealousy in his voice when I told him that the guy was going to take me to lunch after I got back.

I didn't know at the time that Mark was going to impact my life so much. At the time, I was just looking for a friend among the scary, unfamiliar faces. Coming back home from camp, I was glad to return to all of the normalness of life. The older guy and I didn't work out but we have remained really good friends that occasionally joke about our former feelings for each other.

A couple of weeks after camp, I met a guy online and I was instantly attracted to him and we got together on the birthday of the girl who basically introduced Mark and I. Mark was the first person I told about the guy and in a flash I saw his expression change. But at the time, I didn't know.

Throughout the course of my senior year, I was with the guy and Mark took a backseat along with everyone else while I pursued my many goals before graduating from high school. About two months after school started, two mutual friends of Mark and I told me that he had an insanely huge crush on me, which of course I did not believe because who in their right minds would have a crush on a girl like me?

I honestly felt like it was a joke but they kept telling me that it was true until I had believed it myself and every encounter with Mark after that was awkward to the point where my friends and I referred to him as my 'stalker'. It wasn't until months later when I attended a meeting for a bunch of different schools and someone recognized me and told me they knew someone who had a crush on me and had our picture as his phone wallpaper. In the same second that was said to me, I knew that she was talking about Mark. Just recently, he and I had accidentally met up at the beach where I was volunteering and he was with his sister.

So the most logical thing to do to finally confirm if his feelings for me were true or not, was to post a Facebook status update asking the 'Dude who has a crush on me to approach me and tell me straightforwardly that he has a crush on me' and of course, despite the really amusing comments I got from my classmates posts, it worked. He confessed to liking me and I could literally hear angels in the background singing halleluiah because I wasn't going to end up old and option-less.

But of course, there was a matter of my boyfriend, who deeply sympathized with him due to the rejections he had faced himself. With help from him, I told Mark what he already knew about, that I was with another guy and that at the moment, I was happy with him. Mark understood but then added that he was going to wait for me. That he was going to be the first person in line if the guy and I ever broke up. And I promised him that he would be the first to know if it happened. It made me feel weird inside knowing that someone was counting the days until I finally broke up with my boyfriend who I formerly thought was the person I was going to marry.

In the end, I broke up with my boyfriend and Mark was the first to know. He was actually pretty excited about it and I was excited of the possibility of new boys in my life and also the promise of a fresh, clean start in college now that I was free from the struggling hold of relationships. But even then, it wasn't until a solo concert at Mark's high school that I had realized that I made him very uncomfortable in my presence, up to the point where he couldn't bear talking to me for a month, which he almost did succeed in doing until the day of the College Course exams and interviews where he was basically forced into talking to me.

It didn't take long for something to rekindle the fire that burned out more than a year ago. Soon I was butter in the palm of his hands, slowly melting, very slowly getting rid of the walls that my ex couldn't take down. Then started thing people called the 'courting period.' Suddenly all that mattered was doing well in school, continue volunteering and him. He was in my head all the time. It was like if I had a peso for every time he crossed my mind I would have exactly one peso because he was always there. He would be in my mind when I'd be doing Math homework, memorizing the preamble, running around the city handing out sponsorship letters, that entire time, he was there.

And then it happened. One early evening while walking home, we were fighting over something I can't even remember and he told me that he might stop courting me because it was starting to get hectic for the both of us. I was majoring in the field of Political Science and he was taking a pre-med course so of course our schedules wouldn't see eye to eye. But during the fight we sort of got together. That night he held me close and mumbled something I never thought I'd hear again for a long time. "My girlfriend."

In that moment, I felt my cheeks flare red like burning coals and my palms started to sweat. In that moment, everything changed for me. In that moment, I felt like all of the decisions I made in high school led up to that exact moment and it was perfect. For a couple of days, I noticed that I had gotten a lot of unwanted attention from students from his department and it was honestly quite embarrassing for me. In high school, I had been nothing more than occasional blip on the windshield of the school's gossip mill and to suddenly be in college and thrust into four different spotlights was overwhelming and scary.

I could feel the pressure of everyone in my major on my shoulders and my upperclassmen's expectations of me and my skills adding to my academic ordeals plus the weary eyes of his friends and my own and I almost shut down from all of it a few times. But he was there and it kept me going.

Because our interests were so different and our personalities didn't exactly match, Mark and I fought a lot. It was mostly because of very small things that didn't really make any sense to fight about and most of them were my fault but with every fight I felt him leave a mark on my heart that I kept going back to appreciate what had happened and what we had become after every small fight.

Every time I think about what has happened in the recent months, I smile. Mark wasn't just a boy to me. He wasn't just the boy I met at camp. He was the boy I learned to love. He was the boy that taught me how to be human and how to love.

Before him I didn't know that love could exist. I thought 'I love you' was just an empty phrase that you could say to basically anyone as a sign of gratitude. I thought it held no significance in relationships and that it was an excuse you could say to appease someone's anger. I didn't know that it meant something to say it and that it wasn't right to say something you didn't mean.

Whether I like it or not, this boy I learned to love has marked me.

I hope that in the coming days, months and years that his mark on me will prevail through every difficulty that I might encounter with him. I hope that with every passing hour that the mark will remind me that it is alright to have a shoulder to lean on and that it is alright to give up on things that you can't go through with anymore.

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A weird essay I wrote about my boyfriend about a month ago. XD Dude didn't even blink while reading it.