My first real adult ordeal with the opposite sex started in
the 7th grade and should be filed in the “lost opportunity” section
of my love life, easily the most crowded.
I use the word adult not because it was an especially mature
relationship, I was in middle-school after all, but only as way of comparing it
to my early grade school experiences. In
a period where most boys are concerned with cooties and “no girls allowed” club
houses, I had a run of “girlfriends” that just might out number my total amount
of girlfriends since. Relationships in
grammar school were so easy; they existed solely during school hours and
consisted of nothing more then holding hands and sitting next to each other
whenever allowed. But, by the time I
reached middle school I had discovered sex (not by experience but in stolen magazines
and scrambled cable channels) and that was a game changer. Girls were no longer cute little things to
waste time with; they were burgeoning sources of pleasure. For me this was an added layer of pressure
that made girls harder to deal with. I
became more worried about being liked now that the stakes had been raised and
fear of rejection often paralyzed me from taking action. At 13, like most everyone else, I was
struggling to figure out who exactly I was, forget about whether that was
someone the ladies would fall hopelessly in love with.
I entered
middle school as part of the in crowd, but the in crowd had circles that
started with the most popular and spread out from there like when a rock plops
into a puddle of water and I was clearly in circle two or three. All the people in the outer circles seemed to
work at nothing else then to stay as close to the inner circle as possible and
that never sat well with me. It just
felt demeaning trying to latch on to others popularity, so I found myself
leaving the in crowd and hanging out with a group where I would be an integral
part of the inner circle, a group that could be described as nothing other than
nerds. King of the nerds felt way better
then jester of the in crowd. Of course,
that kind of demotion in popularity, whether self induced or not, did not help
when it came to female relations.
It was into
this haze of insecurity, self discovery and social politics that my first crush,
Lisa, walked. We started 7th grade in all the
same classes and I quickly fell head over heels for her. But I was a nerd who ran with a bunch of
unpopular kids and she was a beautiful bubbly cool girl. In my eyes, I had no chance in hell and
became satisfied with watching her from across the classroom. As the year went on, though, we slowly became
friends and by the end of the year we were sitting next to each other in almost
every class. She’d make good natured fun
of me for being smarter then her and I would try to convince her that she was
smarter then she gave herself credit for.
Looking back as an adult, there was plenty of good natured middle school
flirting going on, but at the time it felt like nothing but conversation
between two friendly classmates and I was left to beat myself up over whether I
should ask her out or not.
It’s tough
to write a piece like this and not try to describe how the femme fatale looked
but I can’t really describe it. It’s way
to easy to over fantasize how beautiful she was now that I am so removed from
the experience. I’m sure the vision I
have in my head doesn’t compare to reality, it never does. Not to mention how creepy it is to have a 35
year-old sexualize a 13 year-old, even if he’s using his 13 year-old
memories. But what I know for sure is
she had a smile that made my knees melt.
The way her eyes squinted and the dimples appeared out of nowhere was
just too adorable. I spent way to much
class time just trying to get her to laugh so I could see that beautiful
grin. I tended to be successful more
times then not and that was something else that I absolutely adored about her,
she was so easy going and free to laugh that she made school, something I
dreaded with all my heart, a joy. I
tended to hide my fear of rejection by claiming that what I was really doing
was not risking the relationship we had built.
Why risk making things weird when it was so much fun the way it was? I’ll never know for sure if she was attracted
to me at all but I am pretty confident that she enjoyed my company. She always seemed at ease around me, like it
was OK to be her goofy self or do well in school because there was no way I was
going to judge her. That tended to make
her pretty attractive too.
7th
grade ended with nothing happening, entirely because I didn’t have the courage
to make it happen, and 8th grade found us with a totally different
set of teachers. We’d occasionally pass
each other in the halls and excitedly say hi, but our paths never really
crossed and we were left with no means to socialize, so I once again found
myself pining for her from afar. Then
one day she pulled a stunt that has stayed with me to this day. Before school started each day the whole
student body congregated in front of the building waiting to be let in for
classes. We all gathered in our social
circles, never really breaking loose to talk to others, me with my nerd
friends, her with whatever cool girls she hung out with. I was standing there talking about Terry
Brooks novels or the latest episode of Fresh Prince of Bel Air, when she walked
up and gave me a pack of watermelon bubble gum.
She remembered that I loved artificially flavored watermelon candy and
wanted to let me know she still thought of me.
And I did… nothing. Looking back
now, it’s hard to imagine a bigger green light, certainly not a stronger sign
of middle school affection, but I was still paralyzed by something. Really, at that point there wasn’t much to
lose. I didn’t see her enough for a
rejection to queer a friendship. And
yet, I couldn’t harness my fear or build up enough courage to just throw myself
out there. I’d like to report that this
was just middle school me, that I overcame my silly fears and learned later in
life to throw myself out there, but at 35 I’m really not that much better at
dating then I was at 13.
It’s a little sad to admit but a
stupid middle school crush has come to epitomize a good portion of my female
relationships; become friends with a girl I’m attracted to, flirt playfully for
years, never have the courage to do anything, spend the rest of my life filled
with questions and regret. This
particular chapter in my love life ends with a fizzle, as way to many of my
love stories do. She wrote her number in
my yearbook at the end of the year and I spent the summer debating over whether
I should call her or not. The next year I
went away to a private high school and never saw her again. Years later, a guy I played baseball with
said he was friends with a girl who knew who I was, Lisa, and that she wanted
to come to a game to see us play. I got
more then a little excited but she never showed up.
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