In college, a former boy interest said that he was too busy to call me.

“What do you mean by that?” I said, feeling anger cursing through my veins and tears squeezing through my eyes.

Thousands of thoughts went through my head, but the most prominent one was: He’s at a third-rate college. How can he possibly be more busy than I am? Yes, I had an elitist streak then—I was a top public university in the nation in my senior year. I was not only working part-time as a research assistant, I was also working as a residential computing consultant. I was taking the GRE for graduate school. I was an officer for a club. I had tons of projects then. Intense classwork. And he…I don’t even remember now what major he studied. But it was certainly not comparable to anything I was doing. How could he possibly be busy?

Obviously, he was finding an excuse for being unable to end things so explicitly.

And yet, in the midst of all of it, I still made time. Because I found it that important.