He looked at her while she didn't even so much as give a glance. Every day was the same story. He had this misguided belief that if she would just look at him then he had a chance with her, but we all know that a look is just a look with little to no meaning more than that.
Still, his gaze didn't falter.
He watched as she spoke to many other people, usually in a sarcastic manner to ensure everyone around her knew of her place in the societal hierarchy. She knew she was better. That just made him desire her even more.
There is always that point in time when a person comes face to face with what they believe they want only to discover just how wrong it is for them. This story isn't about that, though it will definitely feel as though it falls along that line.
Our lonely hero decides one day that he will force her acknowledgment. He bumps into her causing quite an awkward moment.
"Why the fuck did you bump into me, asshole?" Her voice is shrill and condescending.
"It was an accident."
"You gross mother fucker, just leave me alone."
And just like that, our lonely hero felt completely crushed. Their eyes met, at long last, and only for her to shut all his desires down.
Of course, that was a few decades ago. Our lonely hero has had many failures within those fateful years - all of which contained fruitful nuggets of information he learned from. His memory of youth was little more than memories of many mistakes, the likes of which he would never want to repeat.
Our antagonist, on the other hand, made but one mistake. One mistake that she has had to live with ever since - marrying the first person who treated her like the condescending bitch she was and letting him make her into his submissive housewife, a mother to his obnoxious and bratty children. Her memory of youth was full of fond memories, memories of dominance and being wildly desirable.
Our lonely hero rarely ever thought about women who rejected him, especially the one who called him a gross mother fucker. Meanwhile, she longed for someone to idolize her the way he did back in those long since passed days.
She knew he stared at her. She knew him running into her was an attempt to gain her attention. That just made her even more fierce, thinking that was the way to ensure he kept going the way he had for so long.
That didn't work, though. The last day he ever looked at her with longing eyes was the day our lonely hero performed his little stunt for attention. It was also the day, he would never find out, that she met the man that would transform her from the fierce bitch into the docile puppy.
The hero of this story learned, in no short part from his experience here, that the amount of effort one puts into winning someone over does not equal the amount of love a couple has for one another. The antagonist learned what it was like to put forth all the effort and never learned that equality was far more a sign of love than effort.
The two would go on with their lives, never to meet again. He traveled throughout the world, finding meaning in every little thing he did. She stayed in their hometown convincing herself that her life had meaning.
-Dustin S. Stover
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