verses are written, verses are sung

• When I was 18 and a Sophomore in college, I was in love with a boy 6 years my senior. I saved up what I could from my measly allowance to buy him a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea’ (one of my favorites) and an expensive blank notebook (that I couldn’t even buy for myself). He told me I was sweet. We never ended up together but the infatuation stayed with me until well into my 20s.
  
• “Do you have a radio station running in your brain all the time?” He asked. I said no. Why? “You always sing a random song and it’s different each time.” He lent me his book for a class that summer. I passed my class and promptly returned his book. He told me he liked me but he had a girlfriend then. We didn’t speak to each other for 2 years.
  
• In High School, I had a puppy love fling with a guy 1 year my junior. He always had earphones on whenever I saw him at school. It was connected to a black iPod Video. I always had earphones hanging over my neck hidden inside my uniform. It was connected to a silver iPod Nano, the square version.
  
• One time, we traded iPods and brought each other’s tiny music machines home. “Your top most played song is Rihanna’s ‘Hate That I Love You’”, he texted me. A few weeks later he ghosted me (at a time when ghosting wasn’t even a thing yet.) I can’t be bothered to remember what his top played song was.
  
• At 22 years old, I met what felt like the closest thing to a soulmate was on a dating app. He was smart, mature, and sweet. And he made me laugh. I had tunnel vision in the way I also did when I was infatuated. He told me he wasn’t ready for a relationship. I went into a manic frenzy and dated as much people as I could, including a guy my close friend was apparently in love with. My “soulmate” ghosted me and my close friend called our friendship off.
  
• Today, I remain friends with my “soulmate”. He’s happily in love with his girlfriend of 4 (5?) years; I’m absurdly in love with myself. I gave him an abridged copy of Marco Polo’s ‘Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls’. I asked him once why he didn’t think I was the one for him. “The first night we were together, I saw you replying to guys on that app on the Taxi ride home.”
  
• A few years later, I dated a guy who simultaneously dated a number of girls. He was smart, immature, but sweet. And he made me laugh. I had tunnel vision in the way I always did, again. He claimed to have ranked all the girls he was then currently seeing and wrote down their pros and cons. I was supposedly at the Top Rank–– Number 1. He changed his Facebook status a few months later to “In A Relationship”–– with Number 2.
  
• The boy took pride in the fact that he was intelligent. A classic Golden Boy that peaked in High School and left astray. He gave me access to his personal Spotify playlist so I could add songs to it. I put in a few. He rescinded my access when I broke things off the first time. “I didn’t want you inserting songs that would remind m of you,” he explained when we became friends again (for awhile). I lent him my copy of Milan Kundera’s ‘Book of Laughter and Forgiving’. He never gave it back.