Day One hundred and five - The sky beneath my feet

Ah, Claudia. I loved her. At least I thought I did. But did I really? No, of course not, but I was madly in love with her, and just like anyone who hasn't had sex in a long while and who now had a good prospect in hand of having it again, I was incredibly horny. And maybe all that made me feel like I loved her. She was, ultimately, a disaster that would inevitably happen, and the likelihood with it happening with anyone else was just as high. I mean, whoever became my first girlfriend after that long relationship was bound to fascinate me endlessly, naturally I'd end up idealizing her, thinking that I'd struck gold with the first swing. No, what this did was begin a cycle that would go on for a very long time - up until a few years back, when I juts gave up. That cycle boiled down to me meeting someone, getting involved with them, either develop great big feelings or none at all, and most often than not, after a few weeks or a  couple of months at the most, it would all crash and burn.

But getting back to Claudia, after she came back to work at the store, nothing had really changed - we got along really well, we talked all the time, and she still had a boyfriend. Right then and there, I had no expectations that we would ever be anything other than friends. But that all changed one night when we went out for drinks - not just us, mind you, it was a bunch of people from the store - but as so often would happen, me and her ended up in a world of our own, talking about this and that, whatever came to mind, really. And we talked well into the night, until we all started to dirft apart and head on to our respective homes. Now, though Claudia didn't really live near me, we had to catch the same bus home, and as we sat side by side during the bus ride, we somehow ended up exchanging phone numbers. And that was, really, the true inciting incident for all that was to happen from that moment on.

So, what that did was facilitate communication between us, right? The distance barrier was slowly being eroded. We'd be texting all the time, whenever we weren't both at work together, sometimes deep into the night. And this at a time, mind, when you had to pay per text sent, so I had to go out a number of times during the early hours of the night to go to an ATM and top up my phone. Jeez, how different things were at the time. 

And late one night as we were texting each other, close to midnight, there came a moment where we felt we wanted to be together. I asked her if she wanted to meet me, and she said yes. Just before 1 a.m. we met up, and stayed together for the rest of the night, until dawn. Something had started that night, and something was about to end.