It all started at the end of June of 2016...

It was during my Taiwan service trip to teach Taiwanese 7th graders English. This was my second year doing the same service trip and it was a little vacation between my senior year of highschool and first year of college.

The service trip organization, Connexpedition, gave all the team members a time and place of where to meet up to mark the beginning of the trip. As soon as I arrived to the meeting place in my team attire and luggage, I sat down with my prospective team. I start to look around in the room to see each and everyone in their team colors. There were people in red, blue, green, pink, and light green. Then it hits me, I see this one person sitting across the room on the pink team. Somehow at that moment, I both our eyes were locked on one another. Even though the whole program has been going on since April 2016 with meetings every other week, I only noticed her when we were split into our own teams in Taiwan.

The whole build up really happened when each team had its own separate members working on their own preparation projects. This girl who I had eyes on came over to me and was asking my teaching partner a question and that's when all the teasing started. I happened to have a marker in hand, and I drew on her arm. Childish thing to do, but at the time, it felt like it was the thing to do. Of course, she jokingly got mad at me for doing so. On the same day, she kept coming back to talk to my teaching partner, and every time she came over, it was another window of opportunity to try to talk to her. At times, I would do the same and go over to her team to talk to one of the team members I knew and would continually use that excuse to go to the team and be near her. At night, she would come over to my side of the room and ask if I could charge her phone for her.

Days go by, and the weekend approaches. On the morning of the weekend, the staff members of Connexpedition took us to many different places and all throughout the day, I kept trying to find opportunities to go find and talk to her. By the end of the day, there were numerous amount of times when I would risk getting in trouble just to go be with her. Around the evening time, all the teams had to travel to their prospective schools and start the next week off teaching students.

The morning after, I started messaging her again and I had a strange vibe that there were mutual feelings between her and I. So I asked her about it, and her reply made me develop a lot of butterflies. Then the wheel started rolling and all throughout the week, I kept messaging her waiting for the right moment to ask her out. Luckily, by the time weekend came, my team and her team's schedules aligned up at the right time and that's when I asked her out - on July 9th, 2016 . She said yes, and then we became a thing.

Fast forward to after the program when everyone departed off onto their own ways, I asked her to go on a date the next day, and she replied with a "maybe". Of course I knew I asked her too suddenly to go on a date the very next day after the trip ended, but she had no other free times. Unfortunately her reply was that she already had plans the next day and couldn't make it. But that was fine with me. The last time I actually had physical contact with her was on the flight back home from Taiwan to San Francisco. I ended up getting a seat next to her, and I had the best 12 hour flight back home. After landing in SFO, the last time I ever saw her was at the luggage pickup area. Then after that, all our communications became through text and Facebook.

Sadly enough, that's about when I felt that everything was falling apart. Sure I was clingy, and neither of us had a schedule that we could line up with, but I tried everything I could to try to keep it together. In the end, she just felt like it wasn't working out and she had lost feelings for me. It was a day before the one month mark and she ended it on August 8th, 2016. At that moment, I felt lost on the inside, it was about 2 months before school started, and all I could think about was her. I had an empty feeling and an urge to try to get her back, but that failed. Shortly after, a week or two before Week 0 of school, I got over the relationship.

Although it was just a summer fling and we didn't do much, I would say that it was one of the most memorable relationships I have ever had. But now that's the past, it's now to look ahead and start a brand new day.

*All names in this article are disclosed for privacy.

*Those who were there knows the entire story in full detail.