The title alone probably makes you laugh at me. Believe me, I’m laughing at myself too. Only because I know how crazy and impossible it sounds, but it happened. I fell in love in 24 hours.
It was the best night of my life if you really want to know. The best two nights, I should say. This isn’t a story about love, though. This is a story about heartache. You see, I’m a girl that loves hard. I get attached. I’m extremely picky with who I spend my time with, and even pickier on who I fall for. But one night, there was an exception. Either that, or I was so picky that I could have picked him out of a crowd.
My mom recently has become single. Her, myself, and my best friend went to the Journey concert at the Sprint Center in Kansas City. It was a bit of a drive, but I loved concerts at the Sprint Center. And I loved Journey even more. I knew it was going to be a good night, but I had no idea that it would end how it ended.
As the concert had started, it was a great time. I knew all the songs, sang "Don’t Stop Believin’" until my throat hurt, and met some fun people around me. After the concert, I was wanting to just go home and hit the hay. My mother, though, insisted to go to the Power and Light district for just a few minutes. We got in, and the DJ blared every tune I had on my iPod. Mom had met some people and began talking to them, so my friend and I went by the stage to listen to the DJ and dance. We danced for hours and hours and finally we went and sat towards the back entrance with my mother.
We relaxed, talked for a bit, and that’s when things got a little twisted.
I was on the far right, my mother was sitting in the middle, and my best friend was seated on the left. We rested on a cement wall that was just short enough for us to climb on. We were approached by three guys, and they introduced themselves. They were from Canada, and they were visiting for the week because one of the three guys had an interview in Kansas. They were at Power and Light to finish off the night and bar hop a bit. The order that they approached me in was easily memorable. They each were different from one another and they were quite hilarious, carrying squirt guns filled with vodka and laughing like fools. The first one that introduced himself to me was wearing one of those strange fishing hats. The next was blonde, and the last had dark peppered hair.and was wearing a red and green baseball cap. We spent the remainder of the night with them. By remainder, I mean until about 4 a.m. The guy with the fishing hat went off to talk to another group of people. The blonde talked to my mom. The dark haired guy and I talked it up for some time. He was a character, and he was very outgoing.
After an hour of talking, he asked me to dance, and warned me how terrible he was at dancing. Though, he wasn’t bad, for after he dragged me out onto the dance floor, we swayed as if we had taken classes together. It was almost unreal. It became even more unreal when we literally swept me off my feet in the middle of the dance floor after spinning me around several times. He sprinted off the floor and everyone around us clapped and hollered. I laughed so hard, it was wonderful. For the first time in a long time, a man had impressed me and had caught my attention.
My mother and I became friends with these three Canadian men. My best friend, since she had a boyfriend, ignored them completely. The guys agreed to stay at our home for the night, and then left early the next morning. Halfway through the day, the guy with the fisher hat texted me asking us to meet them at a Royals game. So what did my mother and I do? We bought tickets and headed to Kauffman Stadium. My friend had to leave, so it was just my mother and I for the day. It was a Sunday, and the Royals were facing the White Sox.
My mother and I met the three guys behind the large screen at a bar, and they had brought some more friends with them. The pepper haired Canadian man came to me, danced with me again a bit, and then held me close for a short time before turning around to watch the game. It was strange, no man had shown me such a strong attention before.
But there was a catch: He was 11 years older than me. It made both of us a bit skeptical. It basically meant that we couldn't be anything more than just friends. Which, after how happy I had been the night before, nearly hurt a little. I had my doubts obviously, but I kept pushing to see what him and I had between each other.
After the game, they had invited us to their friend's apartment in Kansas City right by the theme park. So we spent a solid seven hours there. We sat on the back porch talked, and once in awhile slipped away to be by ourselves. It was when he began to dance with me again in the hallway that I had realized how intensely I had fallen, and how dumb I probably looked to have done so in such a short amount of time. After we took a photo together, I asked him what we were going to do since he was heading back home the next day.
He replies to me, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to keep in touch. It will only hurt us.”
He then proceeded to tell me how the age difference didn’t help that situation. Which, I understood both completely, but it still put me to shame and I can never describe the feeling to you that I felt, but I didn’t like it. I know I sound absolutely insane, but we can’t help who we fall in love with. It just so happens that I had fallen for a 29-year old Canadian man. And I was just a young American girl. Later that night, I said my goodbyes, and they planned on coming back to our house to stay one last night before they left for good.
Driving home, I would look at the photos we took together and it just made the pain a bit worse. The blonde haired man, who had taken the photos, had captured our little dance in the hallway, and had also captured a photo of the way that man and I looked at each other before he ran over to hug me for the ideal photo. It was a small time capsule of how much I had gained, and what I had to lose in such a small amount of time. Photos that related to how we met the night before, photos of his infectious laugh. At 2:30 a.m., I got a call from the blonde haired man. We woke up, picked them up from Kansas City, and brought them back for a good night’s rest. That night, the man I had fallen so heavily for so quickly slept far away from me, and in the morning, he was gone without a trace.
I never imagined such a crazy two nights. A crazy 24 hours. I never imagined that it was humanly possible to fall so hard for someone so much different than me. Maybe I was just crazy about the way we danced together, maybe I was impressed with how well he approached me. Whatever it was, I wish deep down that it could have lasted a bit longer. That I had more answers. I wish I could understand why he was brought into my life, just to leave so quickly. As I do think everything happens for a reason, I still await the day I find a reason for his appearance and disappearance. It will take longer to heal than it took to fall. It was almost like a surreal dream, like they never existed. The worst part about it, is I’m almost sure that I just lost some sort of soulmate. He told me before he left that we would never see each other again. I told him that we would. Only time will tell, though, which one of us is right. But that is the story about the time that I fell in love in 24 hours.
