Lesson Learned.

Ever think there's a "one who got away?" I don't know if the guy I'm about to discuss fits that title but...well, you be the judge.

It was something like Spring 2000 and me and my line sisters took a trip to New Oreleans for some party reason or another. We'd run into a college friend and his friends which included a quite tall cutie. Some random local felt an urge to keep bothering me and so in an attempt to get him to stop, cutie - we'll call him "B" - pretended to be my man. After my harasser walked away, B and I spoke for the rest of the night about music and traded stories about our respective cities. When the night was over, we hugged and went back with our respective crews without exchanging information.

Months later back on campus, my friend mentioned to me that his cousin had asked how I was doing and to "tell her I said what's up." (In my mind, he said it in his thick Nawlins accent that made me swoon a little the first time we'd met). We exchanged a couple of messages between our friend before he got tired of it and said, "Aight, that's it: here's his number and you give me yours so I can give it to him. Ya'll talk to each other." And so it began.

The conversations flowed freely and it was one of the first times I ever felt like j could be open with a guy (I was a fairly late bloomer when it came to guys). We talked about everything, including how long it would be before we'd see each other again since he was in Nawlins and I was in Mississippi. In my mind all I kept thinking was, "This must be what it is like to have a soulmate." And then I came back home to Brooklyn.

B wasn't my man and I don't think you could classify what we were doing as dating but it was something. So when I started hearing more and more about the "homegirl" he hung with all of a sudden, I raised an eyebrow. When my phone calls were often unreturned because he'd spent the night at her house, I started getting upset. Being the passive aggressive person I was at the time, I wrote him a letter expressing my displeasure but added that I didn't want to talk about it on the phone, just "know I don't like it." Yeah, I did that. He called me to tell me he'd received the letter but following my instruction, we didn't talk about the letter.

It was the last time we spoke.

In hindsight, it may have been fault. I was too scared to talk about it and he may have been annoyed because of it. Even though I believed B was more than friends with his homegirl, my inability to communicate messed it all up. Lesson learned.

I saw him three years later and he'd gained like 40 pounds and was super dusty looking. In my mind, his weight gain was some kind of karma for kind of keeping some things from me. Wrong? Absolutely, but I was 22 and dumb. Don't judge me. Was he one of my soulmates or just a way for me to learn a lesson (learn to communicate or lose out)?