Love Hurts

And for once, I'm not the only person struck down with a bad case of unrequiteditis.

Have I ever told y'all about Theresa? Well, here goes.
We met in 2001 when she joined my swimming club, Rovers. Initially (and for probably three years), we didn't really get along that well. We were both on the national team that competed at the British Open in Sheffield, England and the US Nationals in Seattle, Wash., in 2002, at the ISMWSF World Championships in Christchurch in 2003 and of course at the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece in 2004. We have spent more time in other countries together than we have on vacation with our families! And because of that, we have a friendship that I can't compare to any other. I love Theresa.

In 2005, I moved to Dunedin to study at the University of Otago and it was the first time I'd been training seriously without T. When I moved to Christchurch the following year, she inadvertantly came with, and ended up living next door. In many ways I feel that she is my younger, more naïve in some ways but wiser in many others, sister and I really can't imagine many of the experiences I've had without her. Three months after returning from Athens, I distinctly remember one training session in particular where we looked at each other halfway through a set and knew exactly what the other was thinking. Athens was a strange experience that exhausted, enlightened, changed our lives to the extent where sometimes we no longer need to say a word.

Theresa still resides in Christchurch, where currently she's not exactly having the time of her life. A few months ago, she called me to ask if I thought she should attempt a comeback in swimming. Of course, my answer was "yes!". Theresa is a great swimmer, obviously. And she actually LOVES it. When I used to swim, I didn't really do it out of love, more because it was something that catered to my insatiable need for competition, and that brought me success. 

Since then, she's been up and down on the issue, wondering if she can ever go faster than she did when we were younger and much, much fitter. She can, of course, but she still needs to work that one out for herself. In the meantime, she's been coming home to Hamilton each holiday and having visits with a boy she's kind of fallen for.

In what seems to be a cruel twist of fate, said boy doesn't have reciprocating feelings. Which SUCKS, and I don't understand, because Theresa is amazingly cool, but it's caused her to slip into something of a funk. One I completely and utterly identify with. What do you do when you love someone, and they just think you're okay for a bit of fun?

Tonight, Theresa told me it sucked more than breaking up with her last boyfriend - a relationship that lasted almost two years, and at one point had her saying "yeah, I could marry this guy", albeit rather casually. I know how that goes. Not that well.

To be honest, all I want to do is kick this guy's head in. What's he doing? It's pretty well identical to my own Donny situation, only worse because the girl involved is not me, it's Theresa. And she is at least one hundred times cooler than me. Her "depression" (and I'm using this term lightly here) kind of concerns me. I don't want to tell her the things people tell me, because I don't believe them. But I want her to feel better!!

I always tell people that everything in life can be fixed somehow, because Nadia Comaneci wrote that in her book,  "Letters to a Young Gymnast". Nadia's kind of my hero, so I pretty much fob her quotes off as my own. In this case, I don't believe it though. You can't coerce someone into loving you. You can just love them more than life itself and hope like hell that they love you back. If they don't... well, it can't be fixed, can it?

Yeah, okay Brandon Boyd. Sometimes it's a good hurt. But not right now.