I like to scour the foreign drama or romance section of Netflix where I found an Italian film called Malena. I find myself watching less and less Hollywood produced films with the same violence worshipping action packed plotlines and predictable endings.

I'm not as macho as I used to try to be and if I met my younger self of ten years ago, we probably would have gotten into an argument over our opposing flavours of film.

The film Malena really struck a chord with me because it made me think of another girl, Camilla, who could sit in the place of Malena as the tragedies in the film culminated into a sad finale. I felt like the little boy narrator who watched the events unfold against Malena in a film about the tragedy of beauty and unrequited love.

I believe the director was trying to provoke certain feelings as he satirically ridiculed the townspeople in the film in the way they treated the innocent main character who was essentially being punished for her beauty by the jealous womenfolk and their lustful husbands.

I think that every once in a blue moon, God really does create a rare and perfect human being that stirs up the feelings of envy, jealousy, lust and insecurity in everyone surrounding her. They really do exist because I knew one once. It sounds strange but there were quite a few parallels I saw in the movie to the experiences I knew of Camilla and every once in a while, I still think of how badly she was treated by others because of the curse of her natural beauty.

I don't have much of a thing for blondes but Camilla stood out beautifully in a natural way and not just in outward physical appearance only. I've seen plenty of supermodels who can be considered prettier than her but she also had a heart of gold that would never fade with age.

I've never seen her apply cosmetics or wear any stunning clothing to show off her figure either. She was always simply dressed in tennis shoes with a plain undecorated face.

She was a romantic dreamer who somehow always said just the right words even if in a naive way. She had a magical effect over anyone she met that I still cannot explain to this day.

Whenever I was with her, it felt like I was sipping wine in the quiet midnight garden before a moonlit lake. She was just a simple country girl who never wanted anything, was never mean to anyone, nor said any bad things about anyone and was a very optimistic person.

She was special and as far as I know, practically every guy she met fell in love with her.

It was hard not to.

When I first met her, it was Camilla's first time away from home in rural Sweden at age nineteen. She came from a small village in Dalarna, a province where even native Swedes love to make the butt of their redneck jokes. She was a little embarrassed that her father was the village newspaper delivery man and she had only visited Stockholm once or twice in her life.

The major occupation in that area was for a thousand year old copper mine that predated the union of Sweden. The men worked and the women became housewives. Most of her other friends had already gotten married and had their first babies arriving by the age of twenty.

She told me her family had resided in the same village for at least five generations and since they didn't have a lot of money, the only things she knew of the outside world was what she was able to see on TV or the internet. Apparently, all the village boys ever did for fun was drift their beat up station wagons on the local racetrack after they saw the film "Tokyo Drift". All day long.

It was part of her dream to see more of the world and live in a city so she jumped at the chance to join the cultural exchange European Au Pair program when an Amstelveen position was offered to her.

I know I make this sound like such a backwater 1950s place that she comes from but that's exactly how she described it to me. Even though she was telling the truth, I actually had to research it up on the internet to see for myself. The Swedish YouTube videos I found of her village was exactly as she had described it.

It sounded like she literally came straight from a non-tourist village in a remote part of Sweden that hasn't changed much in the past sixty years minus the fact that they have running water, electricity, automobiles, televisions and the internet.

My fondest memory was when we rented a car and drove to Paris for a weekend where we walked along the Seine river telling jokes and waving at random tourist boats, visiting the Eifel tower and briefly sharing a simple lunch of French bread in the garden of the Louvre museum together.

Her troubles began when her Au Pair contract ended and she desperately wanted to stay and work in Amsterdam instead of returning to a gloomy village future back in Dalarna. I couldn't blame her because I would have wanted the same thing if I was her.

Having only a high school education and some spoken Dutch, she was only able to find odd jobs around the city and was often the first candidate to be laid off by employers unexpectedly.

It must have been hard being a pretty girl living in poverty in a foreign country. She worked at a small fruit store but her male employer liked to assign her demeaning jobs like cleaning the toilets on her hands and knees and then standing behind to watch her scrub. This already sounds like a crazy story I made up except I know it to be true because I saw what she went through.

She had a sense of Viking pride that I sensed in her and despite trying really hard just to survive, she never once complained. She cleaned, cooked, babysat multiple kids and whatever else needed to be done and often still was short on rent. She wasn't perfect either and I tried not to put her on a pedestal in my mind. She had plenty of flaws and imperfections that she readily admitted to.

Between the year I left Amsterdam before returning the following Christmas, she had fallen on hard times and was briefly homeless while her so called "friends" had abandoned her. She had been sleeping on one guy's couch for a few months but he had apparently been demanding other forms of compensation since she had no money to pay him. I just couldn't believe how capable otherwise normal people were willing to take advantage of her when presented the opportunity of her circumstances.

One of her au pair colleagues had jealously called her a whore behind her back because of the amount of men Camilla unintentionally attracted but I never told her because I was really hoping those girls would have the sympathy to take care of her if anything ever happen like her running out of money. Those girls were really jealous of her. I actually showed another friend of mine a picture of Camilla and I in Amsterdam taken a year apart and the first thing she said was, "your friend Camilla has gained weight in her face" in a judgmental way. I couldn't even tell if she had or not and it certainly surprised me that the weight was the first thing she noticed in a photo. I honestly believe that Camilla's life would have been a lot easier if she had not been born so pretty.

By the time I returned, she had transitioned into a sense of survival mode and her naive innocence was largely gone.

From secretly reading her personal online lunarstorm.se and bilddagboken.se on the side that she kept for her friends at home to document her experiences, I found out little things I wasn't supposed to know like how she was constantly starving and hadn't tasted even a slice of ham in months until she tagged along to some guy's work party at the bank he worked at. Yes, I was that pathetic token friend zone guy who was secretly in love with her but never gets to be in an intimate relationship with her.

As first when I went back to see her for Christmas, I was only going to give her a cute Pez toy but then I broke my own rules after seeing how she was. I brought her food and groceries and provided a substantial amount of money in a Christmas gift and when I thought I didn't give her enough to help, a further amount of money as a "loan" that she could pay back in ten years or whenever she was on her feet again.

I tried to feed her by inviting her over so we could cook together at my apartment or I took her out to a different restaurant every other night as often as possible. I bought her a few new dresses as a surprise that I knew she liked we had gone window shopping since I knew she didn't own a lot of clothes.

I also really wanted to do something nice for her since her city experience of Amsterdam was fairly negative so I took her on a trip by bus to Brussels instead of Paris so that we could try the whole Belgium cuisine, chocolate and cultural experience. I wasn't made of money either. Both my credit cards were maxed out and I only had maybe four or five thousand euros left in my already dwindling bank account but I wanted to share what little I had with her because she really did nothing to deserve what happened to her. I never once mentioned it because no amount of money could be more valuable than spending time with her. Just seeing her happy made me happy.

We spent several nights sleeping in the same hotel bed side by side in Brussels but we never did anything. Of course there would have been nothing else I would have desired more than to make tender love to her but I felt unconfident all over again. I was actually quite embarrassed when someone mistook her for my girlfriend in front of a group of strangers as I don't really think she had those types of feelings for me that I had for her and I didn't want her to think that I was doing all these things just to try to date her. There's a lot I haven't mentioned of how she lived but it broke my heart watching the way she suffered in silence with a brave face.

I knew that once the trip was over, she would have to return to the life she had put on hold again and I fantasized of holding her and telling her everything would be ok, that I would take care of her or maybe even sharing an intimate moment of a kiss with her. I dreamed of the little things. I don't know what she thought about me because there were days when she looked at a me a certain way and other days when she didn't. I never really asked.

We got into an argument because she had gotten a job offer and was considering becoming a webcam stripper out of desperation which I openly voiced my side of the opinion to. Sexuality is not a very big deal in Sweden and coming from the opposite nature, we had opposing views on the cultural morality of the issue. I was an idiot. I can't imagine how annoying I probably was. She thought I was trying to control her by telling how she should live her life.

Still, I really wanted to see her one last time so I dressed up in my best suit, polished my shoes and walked over to her apartment to call her unexpectedly to apologize. I begged her to allow me to take her out to a nice restaurant near her flat one last time before I flew home. Yes, I actually had to beg her on the phone because she was reluctant to see me again after the argument.

It was a perfect good bye. We avoided the previous issue altogether and had a pleasant conversation that I can't even remember what it was about. I just remember staring into her eyes the entire night and I finally told her about my feelings for her and I'm pretty sure I said something desperately crazy along the lines of me starting a new life in Amsterdam to take care of her for the rest of her life if she felt the same way.

Now that I reflect back on it, I realized that my judgment has changed on her proposed occupation. Webcam strippers are respectable human beings with thoughts and feelings too and shouldn't be automatically judged just because it is socially frowned upon. I should have been happy for her and supported her in her decision to empower herself instead of criticizing her.

I don't regret having met her. My friends laughed at me for all this effort in return for unrequited love but they don't understand how much I cared about her so I never really talked about this with them. I just really hope Camilla has a good life and that whoever she is with now fulfills her needs and makes her happy.

Sometimes, I forget these little memories tucked away in the back of my mind but it's just moments like these from watching a beautiful film like Malena that it reminds me of a girl I once knew far, far away.