So, I had a crush.

That's common enough.

PSYCH. I had a crush for three years.

Almost 5 years ago, the most breathtaking creature I've ever set eyes on said hi to me, and my life has never been quite the same. It was freshman gym class, that one class where all the guys try to prove that they are physically superior, and where all the girls literally don't give a single crap about us testosterone-overloaded monkeys. I remember we were having a lesson in the weight room. Since the most I could lift without popping a shoulder was 10 pounds with both arms, I just busied myself kicking the medicine ball around.

I'm not sure if she frightened or amazed me more when she approached me to say hi. Surely this unworldly, entrancingly beautiful girl who obviously had tons of friends knew that talking to ugly bamboo poles (this is both a reference to my size and my ethnicity) was social suicide? It turns out that she was just nice by nature, and nerdy Asians kicking medicine balls around alone in high school gym didn't sit well with her. So in the end, I got to kick the medicine ball around with a whole group of girls. After that class I'm not sure who questioned my sexual orientation more: myself or the guys in my class.

After that day, I paid more attention to her. As it turns out, she was in every class with me except for science. I had integrated science and she was in physics. I don't think I ever told her that getting the extra credit for science by switching integrated science into an independent study and taking physics in that block was only my secondary motive. But by the end of the first month, I had every class with her (along with two science classes to take). Yeah I know, creepy. But back then, I didn't think I liked her. I just figured that I want more friendly people in my life. I got to hang around all her friends, and her niceness really was infectious. I didn't think that it was practical, but as long as I could stay around her, I put up with being nice. I started bringing KitKat bars into school just so I could give them to her. (Those were supposed to be part of my lunch, but my mum never found out that I wasn’t actually eating them. They were the full-sized, four-fingered, gift-from-God-to-mankind type KitKats).

As is the case with most one-sided high school freshman romances that were never declared, mine was a tragedy. She asked for my opinion of another guy (this guy was a refugee from Africa and he spoke 6 languages, played 4 instruments, ran track, could dance and sing like MJ, you get the idea), and internally it felt like she just stuffed a grenade down my throat. But it wasn’t hard to smile and say “Yeah! I think you should go for it!” It wasn’t as though my opinion had much weight on her decision to go out with him or not, but she was happy, and that was good enough for me to “cope.”

For the next two years, I slowly drifted further and further away from her until I barely talked to her at all. In the process, I became a complete jerk. I learned to lie without flinching and to not give a single crap about how others may feel. During those two years, I felt as though my actions were perfectly justifiable, but that part of my past was like bad beat poetry. It obviously didn’t have much rhythm or meaning to it, but I still try to sell it to myself like it wasn’t as pointless as it was.

I wouldn’t say I found Jesus and everything became better, because that didn’t happen. I knew He was there next to me all along, and I just ignored Him except for when I needed someone to blame. I was angry at Him. I could have been anywhere in the U.S., but of all places, I just had to end up in Armpit, Kentucky, where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows what everyone else does. Slowly learning to talk to Him was an agonizing process, because first I had to accept how horrible of a person I was.

It’s weird though. The thing about acceptance is how underwhelming it is, in the sense that after I had it, I felt like a balloon that finally got deflated after getting kicked around at a birthday party for five hours. It was a relief. It was a good thing. And at the same time, it was a feeling of the lack of feeling. The tensions, the discomfort, the pain—it all went away, and at the end of a very long junior year of high school, I emerged from my chrysalis of self-pity as a supermonk with all the zen that I could feign. But I was completely and utterly over my first crush of high school after three long years.

Obviously, that meant I started dating her the fall of senior year.

It’s weird and I have no idea why it happened, but that’s just how things turned out to be. Mind you, I’m still dating her. As of this month, I have been calling her my girlfriend for 18 months. But what really struck me about the relationship was how much emphasis it placed on spiritual maturity. Because if that wasn’t in place, we would’ve fallen apart 10 months back. She is a very different person than who she was when I first met her. Her two-year relationship with her Swiss army knife of a boyfriend wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be, but I could tell she learned a lot. Somehow in this very, VERY roundabout way, we finally came together. I wouldn’t go so far as to speculate about God’s perfect timing, but if you as a reader think that there’s something to be said about that, I wouldn’t stop you.

So, what's the moral of this story? The nerdy beanpole Asian ended up with the girl, but not in the time-frame he had initially hoped for. Sometimes, the best things in life don't come easily or quickly. They take waiting, they take growth, and they take time. It's not fun to be stuck in that process of waiting and growing, but in the end, we realize that the process itself is part of the beauty of the thing. Sometimes the roundabout way is really the best way.

Here's to the taking the scenic route.