Every girl has these big dreams that when they go to college, they will go out on the weekends, party it up and have fun for a year or two in college. Have a few a heartbreaks and so on. Then come junior year we find Mr. Right in college which we will fall in love with and want to take home to Dad. Graduate together and live happily ever after. The typical college experience. Well, I started to have this experience the first semester of freshman year. Not everything went as planned, and then he came along.

I was down after a bad first college relationship with a man who wasn’t Mr. Right. Until a night in January over winter break, one simple message came along that changed my life completely. A fellow classmate who I knew, but didn’t know much about checked in on me after a Facebook post showed him I wasn’t in a right place. This one message of “Is everything okay?” changed everything. This man came into the life of a woman who was broken into pieces and chose to help me put those pieces back together. He let me pour everything out to him, and he cared about me. What turned into long talks about what happened to me transformed into days of pouring out stories of our past and talking about what we want in the future in both our lives. He let me open up to him, and I let him see every side of me, and he didn’t run. I gave him every chance that he had to run away from me and not have to talk to me anymore, but instead, he stayed and moved closer to me.

First winter break of college had ended, and he finally came back to Kansas! I convinced him to let me pick him up from the airport since I had been so excited to be finally with him in person now. The excitement to be with him in person was crazy, and I couldn’t wait to see where things would go. About a week after picking him up from the airport, he finally asked me out, and the beginning of something beautiful had started.

Coming to the close of my freshman year of college, I've come to realize that the man I have fallen in love with is going to leave me in a few days to go back to his hometown while I go home to mine. The next few months will be a tough time knowing that I won’t be able to see him until he moves back and we will be apart from each other for the first time since we began our relationship. The summer will be a big change for both of us because we see each other daily, and now we are soon to be nearly 2,000 miles apart. No more date nights, horrible jokes that are somehow funny, and the goodnight kisses. Many things will be different during few months that we are apart. But this is not a goodbye because in the words of Peter Pan, “Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”

So when I see you off on your drive home, I will not say goodbye to you, but a simple "I love you," and "See you later," because I will see you in a few months.