“I admire you.”

There, three words that couldn’t have taken the breath from me anymore if they had been “I love you.” 

This, coming from a man that didn’t even know I existed two years earlier.  This man.  The crush to end all crushes. This was Tom Castle. My imaginary boyfriend.  My time waster.  My day dream. My night fantasy.  My love.  The love.  The love of my life.

He admires me. 

I wanted to cry. I wanted to hug him.  I wanted to thank him.  I wanted him. 

I smiled.  I looked down at my lap.  I played with my hair.  I sucked on my lips.  I wish he could have told me this before I was raped.  Before my church took away my friends.  Before I decided to drop charges on a sex offender.  Before I was told to sit down in this room to talk about how brave, honorable and good I was.

But he told me now.  Because he most likely didn’t admire me before.  And I accepted that.

He told me, because that’s what he was supposed to tell me.  Because I was young, and I just had everything I had known, taken from me in an instant.  Because he knew I loved him.  Because he was and has always been Tom Castle.

 

A couple years earlier, I had started a fan club.  It was creatively titled, “Tom Castle Fan Club.”  I was the president.  I recruited other teenage girls to be the treasurer, vice pres., groupie, etc. The fan club lasted a day, but the idea went on by word of mouth.  And soon thereafter, everyone and their mother knew that I, Alyssa, had the leading crush on the pastor’s son.  This lasted through to the first time he talked to me, one year later. 

I was playing a pick-up game of basketball with him.  And he said, “I like that you fall on your face like that.  It reminds me of me.”

I smiled.  I giggled.  I wanted to shoot myself. I always fell on my face.  Hard. Like a Rock to asphalt.  But he noticed.  And he noticed that I was the one who loved him.  So he must have also known that his words were going to stick to me like honey to the floor of a brand new Honda Civic. 

His eyes gleamed at me.  This girl likes me.  I’m going to make her day.

He did.

He made many more days.

So many so, that my mom began to call them “TS’s”, which stood for Tom stories.  If Tom looked at me, maybe looked at me, talked to me, waved to someone next to me, laughed at a joke in church, laughed at a dirty joke, told a joke (which was rare), said something ridiculously corny (which was all the time), told me to do something, walked next to me, or probably most likely you know mom I’m pretty sure he checked me out, it was another TS.

My mom loved these.  She’d sit and concentrate on me and my stories for hours sometimes.  I’d email her about them, and she’d reply in detail. 

I asked her why she listened to the stories, and she responded, “Because through these stories, I learn about you.  I watch you grow up.  I begin to know what you want.”

I had no idea what she was saying.  Because what I wanted was to marry Tom Castle.  Everyone already knew that without my pointless, un-climatic stories.

But slowly, to none of my knowledge, I was learning too.

And to everyone’s surprise, Tom became more.  Through church, and the High school ministry, and a group that me and Tom tentatively named “Renovators,” we became friends.  Acquaintances more so, but it was all the same to me.  

We would email stupid things back and forth.  Sometimes I would wonder if I was just being annoying and then he would randomly send me something twice as dumb.  I knew that Tom and I had a bond.  But even beyond the emails, I could tell I understood him. 

I knew that he cried when he thought no one was looking.  I knew that he was a shy kid, trapped in a family of achieving, well-liked, strong personalities.  I knew that he was not everything that he was expected to be all the time. I knew that he was different then the average grown up frat boy.   I knew that his thoughts were rude and dry and witty.  And I knew that was what made him beautiful. 

It wasn’t just his blue eyes, funny teeth, and bright smile.  It wasn’t his dark-brown, curly hair and nice back.  It was who he was.  You could see it in his face.  He was deep inside himself.  Tom went on forever.  And I wanted to get to know him so badly.  And then I wanted to show him that I was the same. 

I wrote him a birthday card for his 26th.  It was lame.  I wrote down the things that I admired in him: His adventurous spirit, excitable personality, strong sense of self. These were such shallow things.  I knew that they were not even true of me and what I liked in him. But I was not allowed to tell him what I really thought.  

If I had told him that I saw him for what he didn’t let anyone see.  That the things he kept inside were more beautiful and valuable to me than smoldering flames and ripping water.  That I would lie awake thinking about his voice, and the way his lip would curl above his teeth when he smiled.  That I would be able to love him the way he deserved to be loved, with tender, and openhanded love. It would have been too much.

I was already too much, I had thought. No more. 

He thanked me in an email.

Now, I wish I had told him everything.  It would have been a risk, but at this point in my life, it would have been a risk worth taking. 

I will never see him again, because his adventurous spirit took him away.  He went sailing the earth a year ago, and it seems the ocean will taken him further and further away from me and everything I had believed true about him.

But even though he is gone, and I doubt he would think of me anymore, I know that exactly in the darkest and deepest points of my life, Tom knew me the way I knew him.  And when there was a split second in time to give me something, this was what he could give, “I admire you.”   

A little girl, beaten and broken, confused and harmed.  A girl struggling to keep a smile, when staring numb felt better. A girl in a place he stood all his life.  He admired me in that moment, because he admired himself.  He would have done everything I did.

And whenever I hit some point in my life, where I don’t know if I did the right thing, I remember what he said, and somehow I am able to admire myself.

Because I did learn, the way my mom learned. 

I am deeper and more beautiful than most.  I am an ocean full of ideas, thoughts, and creative energy.  I am more than pretty.  I am strong, adventurous and bright eyed on the outside, but dark, rude and dry on the inside.  I am funny, but strange. Confusing, yet intriguing. 

Tom was a mirror. And I was in love with him, because he was everything I was.  Not the man I was supposed to marry, but the person I was too become.

The three years I loved Tom, were the years I learned to love myself. 

 

“Sail on quick.  Fly past the world.  Find me love.”