A girl I've been talking to over the past couple of years.
I missed my first chance to ask her out by a couple of days not long after we first met. I was devastated; she's far from the first girl to slip through my fingers. Despite this, she paid more attention to me than most girls ever had. I think it was the hugs she'd give me.
As it turns out...I'd dodged a bullet. We remained friends throughout, but I watched her go through a pair of boyfriends, and that's when I started to see the red flags. She turned out to be moody, self-centered, and had a desperate need for attention. She styled herself as a writer, but wrote almost exclusively self-insert fan fiction with airbrushed versions of herself as the main character...and got extremely defensive whenever we criticized her writing (Mind you, she asked us what we thought, but if it wasn't "brilliant", she shot it down and ignored it). She became unbearable whenever her boyfriend was around, since she would forget that her friends were present in favor of being all lovey-dovey with her current boyfriend.
I think it was her friends realizing that I was crushing on her hard and warning me away when I realized that I was playing with fire. She's beautiful and captivating, but I know that if I try to reach out and touch her...I'm going to get burned.
She's still around; in fact, she lives withing easy walking distance from me, and I'm welcome over there any time. But I'm through being weak, since 99% of the reason I was still going over there was because she would give me hugs.
I'm still single, and have never been in a serious relationship. I'm still terribly, terribly lonely in my apartment at night. Being around her helped, because it made me feel like I had a chance...but I know that our relationship is only going to end in pain. So I'm getting it over with.
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"There are three things that all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."
-Count Threpe, The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss