The One That Got Away.

It was my first year in Melbourne and the university. It was like being back in your first day of primary school. Except that we came into the start of Semester 5, which meant that everybody knew everybody else, and we were intruding into a very large clique. The new kids on campus.

You were either crying secretly (young adults are not allowed to cry openly), wishing that you were back in the comforts of your home some 6,300 kilometres away, or you were wide-eyed and overly friendly, trying to win the trust of the suspicious natives. Most of them were so cemented in their respective circle of friends that we built our own clique, at least among five or six of us who had come over.

We started making friends cautiously among the more welcoming ones in our batch, and inevitably it was the Asian group who started to open up their circles to welcome us in. (Like attracts like, I guess. I can't explain why I only have a handful of non-Asian friends here in Australia).

The boys who had come over with me were soon becoming fast friends and we spent a lot of time together over meals and holidays. We talked about everything under the sun, and as always, the topic would always fall back to the one subject that freshly post-adolescent boys talk about - girls.

I had barely noticed any of the girls in our batch (no, not because I was looking at the boys, idiot. *flashes wedding ring*) because I suspect I was being overwhelmed by everything else in Australia - living away from home, trying to find accommodation, figuring out how to best budget my money, trying to keep my head above the water with my studies and learning to make new friends. Romantic love is always a luxury, something to be pondered upon and nursed only when you have kicked out of survival mode.

My friend, on the other hand, whose eyes were always roving around everywhere except the blackboard during lectures, started pointing out some of the more attractive girls in our batch. He mentioned the name of a girl who I knew about and shared a class with, but had not thought very much of, until, well, he said she was quite pretty.

Here's the first lesson - sometimes something, be it an object or a person, can pass unnoticed and does not carry any special value until someone else you trust has said Hey, look here - this is valuable. That's the premise of Facebook, I guess (hopefully that's how you got here).

I started paying attention to her a bit more in class, and, against my better judgement, struck up conversation with her. She seemed friendly enough, and quite readily chatted back. Our conversations grew longer and easier, and her eyes seemed to light up whenever she laughed.

Or that's how I saw it through my rose-tinted glasses. (Rose-tinted glasses - distorting reality one delusion at a time. Get yours now!)

I waited until right after my exams before I made my move. We were migrating as a student herd away from the examination hall, all of us chatty and elated that the exams were finally over with the mid-year holidays to look forward to, when I popped the question - 'Urm, hey, do you want to go out for coffee some time?'

Her girlfriends around her did the 'Oooh...' thing that adolescent girls do when a guy asks that question, and she was caught off-guard, but managed to regain her composure and stammered out a cheery 'Urm, yeah, sure! Here's my number!'

I smiled to myself, secretly fist-pumping within (self-five!), and we parted ways, with me walking with a particular spring in my step.

But...

There's always a but. I played it cool (looking calm on the outside with all the eagerness of an puppy with ADHD on the inside), letting a few days slip by during the first day of holidays before I finally made that call to her.

It was an awkward first conversation over the phone, filled with enough small talk to drown a Smurf before I ended the conversation with the primary intention of the call - So, when's a good time for us to catch up over coffee?

Silence.

Here's some excuses I've prepared earlier:

'... shopping with my sister on Chapel street for her wedding dress...'
'... then lunch with friends tomorrow...'
'... catching up with some other friends on Thursday...'
'... rearranging my wardrobe on Saturday. Been putting that off for awhile...'

I know when I am getting blown off. We ended the conversation pretty quickly after that, and so I put down the phone with a sigh.

Something moved in me that day, though. Maybe it was the fact that I was now in a new country. It's time to turn over a new leaf, to be brave, nothing to fear but fear itself and all that, and I decided to try something that I had never tried before in pursuit of a girl - persistence.

The very next day I call her again and say, Hey look, I would really love to meet up. Why don't you tell me when's a good time.

She panicked this time, pulled out her Book of Excuses again, and flipped right to the page marked 'In Case of Emergency, say this...'

'Yeah, I'm not sure but I definitely won't be able to do this afternoon, because I'm going out to lunch with my boyfriend, right, and then we are going to...'

She kept talking nervously after that but it was all just in one ear and out the next.

Boyfriend. Right.

All my brittle newfound determination and dogged Salesmen-of-the-year-like persistence suddenly just gave way beneath me.

What happened to me for the next six months I can't explain to you. The pain that I felt from that girl's rejection, a girl who I knew barely anything about and who, if I really thought about it, meant nothing to me, was almost physical in nature. Her unattainability had suddenly made her even more desirable and me more miserable.

It is never in my nature to ever come between a couple, and so I gave her up there and then, standing on the sidelines instead, eating tubs of ice-cream and singing myself to sleep with self-pitying renditions of All By Myself on my pillow wet with tears.

Okay, so it wasn't that dramatic but it hurt. A lot. Significantly out of proportion to the situation. The old Self-Esteem took a downright beating. But Time is kind, and a great physician of all hurts, and in about six months I was finally able to let go and move on.

Sounds like a long time for someone I barely knew. Here's the second lesson - love is a crazy, inexplicable thing. The matters of the heart are beyond the laws of arithmetics and reasoning. But if you're really, really lucky, and you wish really, really hard, one day you will meet someone who will give you the ability to look back at life - and love - and laugh.

With relief.