A very normal thing for kids to do from my hometown of Osage, Iowa is to go to the Mcintyre Quarry, hike up the seventy foot cliff, and then jump into the water below. Being that I am terribly afraid of both heights and water, I could never bring myself to do it. I would stay at home in the summer or find something else to do while all of my friends went. That is until one day my best friend, Chris Hanke, got me to go with him. No one else ever could’ve gotten me to go, but he guilted me into it by reminding me it was his last night in Osage, and he was moving away for college the next morning (I would still be in Osage as a senior in high school).
Getting to the top of the cliff took at least an hour, where it usually takes about fifteen
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I remember we were talking about him going to college, and how I wouldn’t see him until Thanksgiving, when he grabbed my hand and told me he loved me. Not only as his best friend, but as more. I don’t think I had ever been any happier in my entire life. Chris, my best friend since I was five loved me back. I had loved him since he made me give him my first kiss in fifth grade in exchange for a piece of gum because he didn’t want any other boy to do it. All I could think about was how I had spent my life up to that point with Chris and I didn’t want to spend the rest of it with anyone else. It sounds so cheesy now, and sometimes it makes me cringe on how much I sound like a Nicholas Spark’s book, but he’s my first love. Even thinking back on it now and writing about it makes me tear up. It was such a raw, unfiltered moment, and I realized that it didn’t matter what we were doing, but that I was with him for the first real time in my life. Even though we had spent so much time together before, I felt like it was a new beginning, or a new chapter to my life… something completely new to me. I would say it felt as if I were a new person… but it wasn’t necessarily new. In that moment I turned into someone that had always been there in the background. She was more confident, stronger, and most importantly