'I'm waiting for the day when he'll wake up and remember what I meant to him.' It's been four months since the accident and Jen Stabler spends her first year of Uni – of freedom - waiting for her boyfriend to remember. Unexpected friend, Damien Mannix, spends his waiting for her to forget. But while patience has its virtues, waiting isn't always easy. Neither is going unnoticed by the person you like/love/lust after/all of the above.

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Slowly Spinning
- Prologue -

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There’s something so completely innocent about your first romance. The oh’s and um’s as you stumble through that first conversation, trying to maintain a cool, collected facade while resisting the urge to dance giddily around in circles, merely because his eyes, which are just that perfectly warm shade of hazel, are currently looking down into yours.

The awkward laughter and the averted gazes on that first date, where your heart beats so hard against your ribcage that you’re certain the other person must be able to hear its sporadic ‘thump-thump-thump.’ That chaste moment when your lips meet for the very first time and you’re so heady with bliss that you feel you just might float away if he lets go of you even the slightest.

Such innocence lies in the uncertainty, the euphoria of experiencing something new and refreshing and frightening all at once, the dizzying highs and the miserable lows as you both cling desperately to a bud that’s only just begun to blossom into something tangible, real.

Charlie Reid was my first and only romance – the boy who, just by a single smile, could let loose a dozen butterflies in my stomach, who turned me into somebody who couldn’t string a single sentence together when he was within five feet, who made my final year of high school beautiful and breathtaking and everything the previous years had never been.

He asked me out at the beginning of year twelve and I had politely declined simply because romance just wasn’t on my radar, especially not during my last and most important year of high school. I had a future to think about and an ENTER score of somewhere-above-ninety to work toward. Having been refused, most guys at St. Jerome’s would have spread vicious rumours behind my back or made my life a living hell but Charlie simply became my friend, quoting Simpson’s lines with me and waiting for me outside of my history class so that we could walk down to lunch together.

I think it was obvious to my girlfriends that I was falling for him even before I realised it myself but, by the time realisation had dawned midway through the first semester, I was hooked. Line and sinker.

As cliché as our romance seems, neither of us were the kinds of protagonists people wrote about in books nor gushed about in movies. He was just Charlie and I was just Jen and we were together because I liked him and he liked me. And, unlike the aforementioned texts, our problems didn’t cease just because the Boy finally got to kiss the Girl. We had our spats, our soccer matches, our debates, our exams, just like every other high school relationship. It was remarkable but only to him and me, and it was definitely not something Mills and Boon would pay money to write about.

In fact, maybe if it weren’t for the accident last November, Charlie and I might have already gone our separate ways, our relationship merely an anecdote we would tell our grandkids, our faces a mere blur in each other’s memories. But that agonising month, waiting for him to return to consciousness only intensified the hold he had on me, deepened the feelings I had for him. And then the crushing news, after he had woken, that he had no recollection of the past year, our moments together, only strengthened my resolve. I promised myself that I would wait for as long as it took for him to remember.

Three months later and I’m still waiting. It’s as if everybody else is on the crest of something new, as if time has remembered everybody but me. Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair that Charlie could so easily forget while my own thoughts are constantly plagued by memories of us and what we once were.

One day, one gorgeous out-of-the-blue day, he’ll wake up one morning and remember who I am and what I meant to him.

All I can do for now is wait.

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I start new stories, but I never abandon the old. But beginnings are always fun and relaxing. And middles and endings are too complicated and stressful to focus on in a fortnight filled with assessments and exams. On a side note, I posted this on my other account. But I tend not to focus on stories from there so here it is.