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I didn’t believe in love at first sight. Well, I don’t think I did. I believed in it in the way that people believe in every other inaccessible hope and dream. It was an idyllic, fantastical idea that was unattainable to common folk like you and me. The only people who experience “love at first sight,” I thought, are in books, movies, and TV shows. Looking back on it now though, I think I only didn’t believe in it because I didn’t really know what love was.
I didn’t have a best friend for the first 18 years of my life. I spent so many years trying to fit in that my friends were never really the kind of people that accept you for who you are or don’t make you feel like you have to fit in to be accepted. University, I decided, was the place to open up, find myself, and be myself.
I am a nerd. Simple as that. I am the epitome of nerdy fandom tumblr trash and I was raised by a father who would also have been, had tumblr existed during his childhood/teenage years. So, inevitably, he was going to find out about quidditch (and thus, so was I).
One day, my father excitedly explained to me that Cambridge University had a quidditch team. I laughed, because of course what fucking nerds, but the idea also intrigued me greatly. I had always loved Harry Potter, staying up late many nights throughout the years reading, and rereading, and rereading, and rereading about the greatest world ever created. I loved the idea of quidditch. In the books, it had always seemed so cool. I had never loved sports though. The theoretical idea of being a part of a team and doing something cool and fun together to achieve a collective goal was, in it of itself, an appealing notion, however the actual required effort of the sports was usually enough to put me off. Only football really managed to hold my interest but even that I eventually gave up on. So, when I found out about quidditch, I was understandably pretty nervous. Based on the (admittedly minimal) research I had done, it seemed to be a pretty involved sport, and I was not as fit as I wanted to be. Regardless, I told myself that whatever school I ended up attending, it had to have a quidditch team, just in case I decided I was going to try out.
In the end, I decided on Manchester for uni. My boyfriend, Kyle, was happy because I had chosen somewhere that wasn’t too far from where he was going, but to be honest I knew being in a long-distance relationship was a recipe for disaster, considering his previous trust issues, and was trying to figure out a way to break it off without it blowing up on me.
The first thing I did after making the decision to play was Google the Manchester University quidditch team. The first link that popped up was to the Manchester Manticores’ Facebook page. Being the cliché internet stalker that I am, I spent way longer than I care to admit scrolling through all the posts. One thing (read: person) stood out to me above all else. He was so beautiful. Through a little more digging on the page I found out that this person was the captain of the team. I found the first picture I could in which he was tagged and found out his name – Phil Lester. He had black-dyed hair that mirrored my own straightener-abused fringe and the prettiest cerulean eyes I had ever seen.
I’ve said already that I didn’t believe in love at first sight. That was because I had never seen Phil Lester before. I made up my mind then and there that I was going to play quidditch and I was going to meet Phil Lester.
But first, I’d have to figure out what to do about Kyle.