Every word of this is true except the names.
When I was growing up – I’m 24 now – I was friends with a girl we’ll call… Sally. Sally and I were friends but there wasn’t more to it than that.
Sally’s sister was Natalie. Natalie was younger, and she had a bit of a crush on me. Sometimes Sally and I would go to the cinema or just stay in and Natalie would just be… around. She’d come and say hi when I came over or came out of the house when I’d pick Sally up. Natalie was going through that cute/awkward phase I guess we all go through, sometimes looking really cute, sometimes looking like she’d dived head first into H&M and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, as the years passed Sally and I became more distant to the point we no longer really spoke. I was still friends with Sally’s other sister Marie through another friend of mine, and one night when we were all out, Marie had a good laugh at me remembering how much of a crush Natalie had on me.
Fast forward a couple of years and I woke up one morning to an intriguing request to follow me on Instagram. It was Natalie. Of course, I had a look at her profile and she’d gone from being awkward/cute to just full-on cute. Her hair was dyed red and gone was the slightly shy girl I knew – in her pictures, at least, she looked confident and full of life.