A/N: sigh If life could be like this, it would be so, so, so much better. Have fun reading!

My life contained a lot of stress. I had the best tool against it- my boyfriend.

For about a year, I was able to cope with every little piece of stress. I tried to meditate -I failed often- and I listened calm music when going to bed. Then my parents divorced, and my troublesome brother started to be even more troublesome by not going to school and failing his exams and dropping out of school to do nothing except staying at home, waking everyday at ten a.m. and playing on the computer all day long. His life consisted out of nothing but stupid games, and, although he was eighteen, he did not have a job, nor friends, nor a developed brain containing everything he needed to survive and live his life.

I was being driven crazy. With a brother home all day, and a mother pretending everything was okay when it was absolutely not, I felt like I was the only one who knew reality. I started to lock myself up in my room, with my friends on the internet to talk to. Every day was just the same, in the end I almost couldn’t handle it anymore.

And then he came. We met on the internet, got friends, and found out we lived half an hour cycling from each other. Although I hadn’t met him in real life, not even once, I fell in love with him. Then the day came that we met each other -I still remember what he was wearing, what I said, the way he laughed- and we got even closer friends. It did not stay that way- about a month after we had first met, he asked whether I wanted to be his girlfriend. I said I had waited for this moment for a long time and we started hanging out every day.

He had just finished school and he was planning on doing some work here and there for about a year, and then to try and get into college. This meant he was home every time I visited him -which was immediately after school and at the weekend. I loved to be at his place, out of the stress. He even helped me with my homework and we were happy. All we needed was each other and we didn’t care what the rest of the world thought about us. My mother pretended she didn’t notice me coming home late every day- she only asked how my day was and then we wouldn’t talk anymore because I would be upstairs in my room.

There was this one day, when I was at his place and he was helping me with my homework, when he said he wanted to talk. I got frightened because that didn’t sound very well, but he said he wanted to do something special for my birthday, like going away a weekend to Paris. I was overjoyed, hugged and kissed him, and agreed. We were going to Paris! I was already thinking about how it would be there, so-

“Could you please repeat what I’ve just explained, you over there?”

Oh no. Was he talking to me? I looked at the teacher, a bit nervous, and answered: “I’m sorry, sir, but I didn’t really understand the last part. If you could explain it to me once more, I’ll take more notes and I’ll try very hard to understand the theory.”

The teacher thought about it for a little while, then decided that this excuse was a good one- he started explaining again. It was a useful excuse when I had started daydreaming again and didn’t catch a single word from the teacher’s explanation.

I looked at my notebook and saw that I had written down everything I had daydreamed. Suppressing a giggle, I started reading: ‘My life contained a lot of stress. I had the best tool against it- my boyfriend.’