I
remember during my senior year in college, I had a deep, deep crush on a guy who on paper seemed like my ideal type at the time.
He had a really cute smile with an attractive aloofness that younger me
somehow enjoyed. (I liked to suffer as a young girl. I assumed it was part of romance. I now realize it was caused by my conservative upbringing, that I was trained to wait and wait and wait.) I had met him while attending an out of town conference
on advertising. I can’t remember why I went. I had no business being
there at all. I think a friend who was actually in Advertising (and not in Communication Arts, like I was) thought it would be a fun trip to do.
I had driven with him and his friends as a last minute arrangement because my original transportation plan had fallen through. Throughout my day with them, I tried and tried to impress him. He was curious in photography having just bought a camera of his own, so naturally I showed off. I had a new, fancy lens and we ended up taking a lot of silly photos as I tried to “teach” him.
We were at that conference for like three or four days. (I’m telling you, I can’t remember anything about this trip except for this burning crush!) We had shallow conversations here and there. Anyway, what mattered most to me was that I went back home having exchanged phone numbers with him.
The chase was so exciting to me at the time that I looked forward to running into him at various parts of university—in the alley where the street food vendors were, by the garden near the school museum. I imagined pretending to not have seen him, possibly doing a classy hair flip right at the perfect moment. It was pathetic. Finally, one day, he asked me out. We planned to see a movie and maybe eat something. I tried to be as nonchalant as possible when I said yes, but I was so excited.
We met up at the mall one Saturday and I immediately felt that something was off. He begged to go outside so
he could smoke a cigarette. I hated cigarettes and I could barely
contain my annoyance. Nonetheless, I caved. I stood in silence as he
puffed away.
We took forever picking a movie to see because we had literally opposite tastes in movies. Once that was settled, we had about an hour to burn before our showtime so we sat down and tried to talk. He didn’t read so we couldn’t talk about books. He hadn’t heard of Sufjan Stevens or The National either and didn’t really seem interested in hearing more. Instead, he talked to me about how his accounting classes were going, as well as his friends he went drinking with a lot. Then, dead air. A lot of dead air. I went up and got ice cream just to have something to do. I was dying of boredom. It was one of the most painful conversations I’ve ever had in my life and I think that’s the only reason I remember all of these in great detail. My crush was dying very swiftly every second I spent with him and I was, once again, wondering what the fuck I was doing there.
A couple days after this date, we did something that now seems so mature to me when I think about it. We did a postmortem. What didn’t work out? we asked each other. Did you hate me? we both wondered. Then we had landed on the same answer: We just didn’t have any chemistry.
How disappointing to create
this idea around a person only to be crushed by the boringness of
reality. I enjoyed the scenarios I had made up
in my head of what our dates would be like so much that real life could never have made up for it. One of the things I learned about myself then was that I really enjoyed liking someone in secret, as it gave me a chance to daydream away. It was
always so fun until I started talking to them.
Of course, that
wasn’t always the case. I did have boyfriends I adored. Also boyfriends I
endured. The usual. But my fondest memories of my teenage crushes
will always be of that period of time before I got to know someone.
Sometimes, they proved my imagination wrong, as was the case with this
dude. And sometimes, they proved me right (hence, boyfriends).
Sometimes I miss being young and stupid. At the same time, I am happy to be past it. It’s hard to explain.