To All the Girls I've Loved Before Part VII

My freshman year of college, I made a new best friend. Fabio was a returned missionary, one of the few in our freshman ward, so therefore cool enough to hang out with the marriage-minded sophomore girls in the ward. I tagged along. We started hanging out with an apartment of six girls (the girls in the ward lived in apartment-style on-campus housing, while the boys were in true dorms) because Fabio was pursuing one of them. For some reason, though, things didn't work out with her, and as per the apartment rules one of her roommates was assigned her leftovers. So Fabio started dating Lois, which meant that I was often paired up with Lois's room-roommate and best friend, the Spastic Wet Noodle.

Noodle and I quickly became good friends. She was witty and wacky and she liked giving and receiving back scratches. All six of the girls in the apartment were very physically affectionate with me in a joking sort of way--me being a pre-missionary and therefore not serious dating material--but I particularly enjoyed the attention from Noodle. I began to wonder if she liked me as much as I liked her, but the problem was that she was already waiting for a missionary, a guy she'd dated her freshman year. It would be silly to ask her to date me, knowing she'd then have to wait another two years while I served my mission. So I didn't. And I still don't know if she was really interested in me or if I was just a convenient placeholder while she waited for her missionary. Either way, it was fun while it lasted.

The funny thing--funny now, but tragic at the time--is that she didn't marry her missionary when he came home. About halfway through my mission, after not hearing from her in quite a while, I got a tape from the girls, in which Noodle mentioned that she was engaged to some guy she'd met at church. I was devastated. I didn't get over it until I came home, had a bit of a reunion with the girls from the apartment, and met Noodle's husband. He's a nice guy. Now they have four kids.

Fabio and Lois also have four kids now. They live not too far from Noodle & Co. This is interesting because when I imagined myself married to Noodle, it was always in conjunction with Fabio and Lois, who we'd live close to and all be jolly good neighbors. This is not to say that I didn't like Noodle for herself, but my interest in marrying her had a lot to do with preserving the group dynamic we had that year. It seems my life is a series of efforts to fiercely cling onto the status quo, only to find eventually that it's okay for things to change.