NO STRIKE FOUR

UNEDITED SAMPLE LITERARY ARTICLE
By Jose Mari Hall Lanuza
IV-Enrico Fermi


He never, for once, thought that things would go this way. Not once.

He never knew what real love was like. He saw the matter the way TV shows and movies depicted it. He thought that once you fell for someone, a happy ending was sure to come any time soon. He thought that rejection and pain never existed with someone you love. He thought of it as a noble, almost perfect thing. He thought wrong.

When he fell for his best friend, he found out early that it was not like the movies he had seen before or the shows he had watched at home. There were complications involved, complications never shown in stories ending with the line “happily ever after.” He had to hide his feelings because he knew his best friend loved someone else. He had to endure their long conversations that never missed the lines “he’s so sweet!” or “I really love him.” So when he finally mustered up the courage to tell his best friend the way he felt about her, it was too late. She said that she liked him too, that she felt the same way, that she loved him more than the other guy. But she thought he never felt the same. He realized the mistake he made, but it was simply too late. His best friend was already with the other guy. He never had the chance to have her. Strike number one.

After his heartbreak, he found peace and happiness in the form of their class valedictorian. She never saw it coming, and so did he. One day, they just happened to be left alone in school. They were really happy with each other that day, and things started there. For the next few days, they spent each moment near each other. He thought that maybe this was the love he saw on movies, the love he saw on TV shows. Everything was perfect. They were happy having one another. They were supposed to be the perfect couple, until graduation. He kept the tears to himself, he never showed his emotions. While he was on the first row and she was on the stage, they both tried to look happy. He made her laugh, she gave him a smile. And when the ceremony ended, he didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. He just touched her ever so slightly on her shoulders and told her to stop crying, then walked away. They never saw each other again. Strike number two.

When he entered high school, he tried to avoid love for a while. He treated the TV and the movie screen as traitors, fooling him with naïve, perfect views of love. He thought that the only way those things could happen were if there was either a couple of fairy godparents roaming around, or there was divine intervention. He lost his naïve views - or at least, until she came. She was a friend of his best friend. All three of them were batch mates. She was with another, but things were already vague between the two of them. When the girl finally broke up with the guy, he came into the picture. He befriended her, comforted her, and helped her with her problems, with the hope that someday she would notice him. It took a long time, and a lot of effort, but it paid off. She said that she liked him too, but things immediately got up in a bad way. They drifted apart, and someone else came in the way. He was sure he had lost her forever. He grew depressed for a few weeks. He never got to accept that things simply were not meant to be. Strike number three.

After three strikes on love, he thought he was surely out. There never was a fourth strike in baseball, and the third time should have been the charm. So he sank into a deep reverie, thinking that maybe love was stupid. From then on, he always told himself, “if it is meant to be, it is meant to be. If not, then love sucks.” He kept on brooding over the seemingly repetitive tortures his heart went through in the past few years. He thought that love would never come again. Maybe he grew tired of it. Maybe it grew tired of him.

On his birthday, a few days after Valentine’s and a few weeks after his heartbreak, he decided that it was time to stop being depressed. He started to live life again. He talked to his friends again, and he gained new ones in the process. He also gained the person who would eventually make him believe again in the noble and naïve views of love. He regularly played pranks at her back then, so he knew her. They were acquaintances. So it did not shock her when he asked her for a gift. He said that someone to talk to would be neat, so they texted each other very frequently. They became instant friends. He told her about his problems, she confided her secrets to him. They became very close within a short amount of time. It seemed that their personalities really clicked, even though they were two opposite people. As days passed, it seemed that they grew fond of talking to each other, and they knew that their days were incomplete without receiving at least one text message from one another.

They never saw it coming. He never thought that he would have come to love her, and that she would feel the same. They thought that friendship was all they had to offer to each other, but apparently they were wrong. They slowly realized that they loved each other. He found out that there was another side to love, a side he never knew. A side that felt like paradise. They were suddenly the perfect couple. He was lost without her, she was miserable without him. Finally, he found someone that loved him the way he loved her. Many problems arose, but they faced them together. They never let go. They never gave up. They simply got over every hurdle that fate gave them. They were in love.

He thought that fairy tales were never meant for reality. He thought that such things were not humanly possible. Now, he thinks exactly the opposite. He is the knight of his own fairy tale, with his fair maiden by his side. And even though happy ending is a little farther than normal, they know that it will not escape from their hands. They know that the ending will only be happy if they spend it together. This is his fairy tale. He hopes that you will have the same ending, a happy one.