Miami Student

Issue date: 11/9/07 Section: OpEd Page

Katelyn Hawthorne//For The Miami Student

I watched Titanic the other day-Leonardo DiCaprio was cuter than ever, but that is besides the point-and it truly is an all-time classic love story. Boy meets girl (we're going to forget that she's engaged for the sake of this article). Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl make plans for future and then, what do ya know, the boat sinks.

Then what do you do?

Recently, the ill-fated Titanic has become an all too fitting metaphor for my love life-supposedly indestructible, but ultimately doomed.

My boat began taking in water two months before it finally sank at approximately 1 a.m. Monday, Oct. 8-I curse my good memory on occasions like this-ending an amazing, but tumultuous three-year long-distance relationship.

Now, I'm stranded in the middle of nowhere, seemingly clueless about what to do. I didn't have any lifeboats, or any backup plans because I didn't need any.

We were unsinkable.

We had made plans for the future-most of which involved me leaving everything and everyone I knew-and for me, that was OK because it was an adventure, a new life with him.

Now that I'm planning for my own, single future, it is a shame that all those plans went down in water all because of a not-so-little iceberg-in our case, distance.

When I met my Jack, I was-like Rose-dating someone else at the time. Regardless of how cliché it is, I couldn't help but fall for his adorable shyness and his passion for music and movies and everything in between.

He was living in Michigan at the time and I was still a na've 16-year old-girl, falling hopelessly in love for the first (and only) time.

It's been four years, but I can still see the lake in the horizon and feel the rocks where we sat on our first date.

I can still remember the small canoe in the distance that rowed past when we talked about what was to come.

The decisions we made during our relationship were never easy-some of them were the farthest thing from easy-but we made sacrifices and compromises for one another.

Through late night phone calls and text messages, we kept our love alive, which amazed a lot of people. It amazed us.

My ex and I went months, sometimes even a year without seeing each other. But unlike some relationships, that distance made our relationship stronger. (You know the saying; "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" and, boy, was I fond of him.)

Continued...

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