I have a crush on a boy. This is bad. The last time I lusted after a boy like this was in grade 11. The year, I personally believe (me, without any training in the field other than what I gleaned from dated high school books and fledgling Wikipedia articles,) my self-diagnosed depression began and thrived.
There was a boy.
He wasn’t really all that and then some, if you know what I mean. He wasn’t the bees knees, or all that and a bag of chips, he was simply average. He had his group of friends, and I had mine, they just seemed to cross paths occasionally. And by “occasionally,” I mean he dated every single one of the girls in my group, for various periods of time. Breaking up with one and taking the next one on a date a day later. He was, simply put, a serial dater. I can’t really tell you how things evolved. But I can explain how the crush developed, and how I forcibly broke my own heart so no one else could.
I think, maybe, that I let the idea of him into the inner chamber of my heart because, simple as it is, he spoke to me. Flashback:
I am in grade 11. I am 17 years old. I am the quiet freak in a gaggling group of girls. I am fat, seen by myself as worthless, ugly. My best friend, my Siamese cat Sasha, is ill and will soon die. I am depressed. I wear black t-shirts, of which I own countless numbers. My puffy hair is untamed and parted down the center of my head. I have yet to begin maintaining my brows, and I am fat, fat and ugly. A year later, one of those gaggling girls will corner me in the library and tell me not to be embarrassed if I’m gay, since I don’t giggle over boys like the others do. I will be too shocked at the assumed implication that I will not be able to tell her that the reason I don’t obsess over boys like the rest of them do is because I am convinced that my inherent ugliness and girth “gross boys out,” as it were, so I see obsessing over them as a waste of my time and effort.
I am in grade 11, and this average, Ontario farmboy talks to me. I slowly become stricken.
I try to ignore these feelings, try to convince myself that he, like most other boys, is a jerk. I watch him date through my friends faster than I can recognize the development of a crush. By friend 4, I begin to daydream. By friend 5, I’m trying to plan out, in my head, how the conversation will go when, not if, he asks me out. By friend 5, I’ve convinced myself that he was only dating them because he was too shy to ask me out first. That he was my knight in burnished armour.
I panic. I find myself watching friend number 5 with growing jealousy. I begin to imagine nightmare scenarios, where he dumps number 5 for me, or worse yet, we go out and friends 1 through 5 turn on me for it. So I break my heart. I find reasons to despise him, I find flaws in his character, in his person, and extrapolate on them until he is nothing but dirt in my eyes. I take all of those panic situations, those nightmares, and convince myself that they will, without a doubt, happen. I hate him.
But when he breaks up with friend 5, and begins to go out with some other girl from outside my group, I hurt.
I start to feel a hole being dug into my gut, under my ribs, just below the surface. It’s like hunger pangs I can’t satiate – it is all consuming. I had broken my own heart, out of fear. He had inadvertedly broken up with me, out of disinterest. I hurt, like hell.
I have a crush on a boy.
He is nothing spectacular. He is simply average. He has his group, and I mine. We just happen to cross paths occasionally. He is nothing special. He just talks to me.
He has some of the kindest eyes that I have ever seen.
I’m going to have to break my heart again, before it’s too late.
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