After

Prologue

College always seemed so crucial, such an essential part of what measures a person's worth and determine their future. We live in a time where people ask what school you went to before asking your last name. From an early age, I was taught, trained really, to prepare for my education. It has become this necessity that required an overwhelming amount of preparation and borderline obsession. Every class I chose, and every assignment I completed since my first day of high-school revolved around getting into college. Not just any college- my mother had it set in her mind that I attend Washington Central University, the same school that she attended but never completed.

I had no idea that there would be so much more to college than academics. I had no idea that choosing which electives to take during my first semester would seem, just a few months later, like travel Affairs. I was naive then, and in some ways I still am. But I couldn't have possibly known what lay ahead of me. Meeting my dorm mate was intense and awkward from the start, and meeting her group of friends even more so. They were so different from anything I've ever known and I was intimidated by there appearance, confused by their pure inattention to structure. I quickly became part of their madness and indulged in it...

  And that's when he crept into my heart.

From our first encounter, Harden changed my life in ways that no amount of college prep course or used group lectures could have. Those movies I watched as a teen quickly became my life, those ridiculous plot lines became my reality. Would I have done anything differently if I had known what was to come? I'm not sure. I would love to give a straight answer to that, but I can't. At times I'm grateful, so I really lost in the moment of passion that my judgment is clouded and all I can see is him. Other times I think of the pain he caused me the Deep staying with a loss for who I had been, the chaos of those moments when I felt as if my world had been turned upside down, and the answer isn't clear as it once was.

All that I'm certain of is that my life and my heart will never be the same not after hard and crush them.