My pre-teen love-of-my-life story

      I have been zeroing in on my soul's desire and using a dating site to do it, I realize. I thought it was the strangest thing. I had reverted to breathairianism, supporting my innocence....yet I could not give up smoking. That is strange in it's self because any time in my life I felt safe enough to express my innocence I gave up cold-turkey without a craving or lingering health affects. So, what is the problem? I didn't bother to focus on it.
      So, there I am interacting with a guy who is wanting someone with whom to re-create the way he was brought up. I was exploring what that means and how it would affect me. Waking from a nap it all came flooding in.........
     When I was a pre-teen my brother brought a friend home through the woods named Jeff White. He and I hit it off and so we would meet in the woods after school. One day my brother told my mom and dad and I was ordered not to meet him again. Always obedient, I listened. Insane that I did not even consider that my brother, who was nine months younger, walked off every day and got into trouble. My parents were absent and would never know if I obeyed or not. 'What would posses my brother', I wondered, but didn't dwell on it.
     Then in high school I saw him again. He was one who took shop classes while I was stuck at the other end of the building taking college prep curses I didn't want to be taking. In order to get close to him, I started smoking. It was the only place we could meet, where I knew he would be-in the smoking area during lunch. I was hoping he'd ask me out. He never did. I ended up over there standing alone just I had been standing alone at the college prep end.
    The captain of the baseball team asked me out, though and we were a thing until he went off to college. I broke up with him because I figured he'd find someone in college and wouldn't be interested in keeping a relationship with a high school girl who had no idea what she wanted to do. It wasn't all insecurity, though and it wasn't all a mercy letting go for his best interests. I wondered often why it just didn't matter 'as much as it should' to me. Until now.
  It hit me like a ton of bricks this evening: I had been holding out all these years for Jeff White. I continue to smoke hoping he'll ask me out, lol. And yet I know the intelligent thing to say is, oh, I just need to reclaim that part of me which I left back there with him: simply loving like a pre-teen. Without question about his qualifications, his plans, his relationship intentions, no drills, no questions...a simple yes, this is him. But my soul doesn't want to go there yet. It wants to be where it is: loving Jeff White because he is a simple kid just like me, liking being liked just like me and yet it must have been so much more than that because plenty of guys have liked me just fine over the years. Men have obsessed, climbed fences, played knight in shining armor........while all the while I only wanted a simple boy from a small town in Connecticut.
   I'm probably not the only one. Faithful unto death to a pre-teen 'fancy', not realizing that at that age, we really DO know what love is and that yes, that love CAN last a lifetime. heh, who knew? Jeff White.
   And voila! I allowed it to sit and it was released on it's own, in it's own time (a couple hours, lol resiliency!)