“Hey,” I wanted to tell him, “I said yes to going to this dance with someone I’m not very interested in. I don’t want to ask you to dance, because I don’t really want to hurt his feelings.”
“Oh,” is all he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around then. Maybe next time we could hang out.”
As he continues staring at me, I walk away.
This scene plays through my head years later as I wish that I had the balls to say these things out loud at the time. Instead, I continued to play the game of occasionally staring at each other and pretending that the other didn’t really exist.
Eventually, our circle of friends started to converge because of similar recreational activities, but our avoidance continued on.
It was always…weird.
Then again, my crush in third grade had decided to make this abundantly clear when I had decided to tell him that I liked him. I remember his remark of “You’re weird”, and then he walked away as if to pretend I’d never said anything at all.
Instead of feeling embarrassed, I said an enthusiastic “Thank you” and smiled. So yeah, I’d also kind of prided myself on being a little weird. And this boy at the dance didn’t prove to be the exception.
I really relate to the saying that when you fall in mutual love with someone, you fall into mutual weird. For a really long time, I’d just been looking for the right version of my weird. I thought my weird was just weird in general, so anyone who fitted into the weird category seemed like a good fit for me.
This guy from the dance was peculiar.
For months when I’d first seen him, we’d had this nearly daily occurrence in the lunchroom where we would just lock eyes for the duration of his walk by me. I’d never said a word to this person in my life, and I had never met him before the first time this had happened.
I’ve read a lot of fantasy novels. These interactions at lunch excited me the same way reading about Edward and Bella’s fluttering romance in Twilight excited me. As with most teenage girls, I was a hopeless romantic. These small, insignificant moments were enough to set off my wildest ideas and fantasies.
To this day, I’m not really sure that all the books I read in my formative years helped me in life. They acted and still act as an escape from reality and send me off with unrealistic expectations about the kind of excitement that I could face for the rest of my life.
Naturally, with any good fantasy you conjure in your mind as a teenager, none of the romantic and wild ideas I had came true. That never stopped me from thinking about them over the next couple of years. None of the things that I fantasized about happening with my crushes ever really left my mind.
Of course, now I understand the difficulties of a real relationship. And I have accepted that people are imperfect and many, many things could have gone wrong if any of my fantasies had played out. But they were fun while they lasted in my mind.
This guy from the dance was amongst the many crushes I had on people growing up.
I think I grow these extreme fascinations with new people I meet because you never really know much of anything about these strangers. In some cases, you don’t actually learn anything at all about them. Which only ever allows your mind to come up with more widely outrageous ideas about their character and your compatibility.
For a long time, I had a really nasty habit of falling in love with the idea of who people were.
Sometimes, I can’t help but imagine the books I’ve read play a role in this. The best part about reading a good book is that you fall in love with these characters who are complete strangers to you. They will remain strangers to you forever as they only exist in this parallel universe that holds no firm grasp on your current reality. Acknowledging that these things that feel very real to you, don’t exist at all is hard.
But that’s what people are to you in real life too.
So many people enter and exit your life, and very few do you get to know. And none do you ever know without your own projected perception of who they are. In some cases, it’s exciting to look at people and create stories in your mind about who they are and what has motivated them to do what they’ve done. It certainly keeps life interesting.
But in other cases, it’s unhealthy. It leads to unrealistic expectations for other people and unrealistic expectations about how exciting your life will be.
Don’t get me wrong though, life certainly can be exciting. It’s just the frequency and amount that ends up a little jumbled.
I’ve been fighting this balance between reality and fantasy for quite some time now. Sometimes all I want to do is curl up and escape from the monotony and mundanity of it all. I have learned how to fight with this side more because it’s smart to keep a firm foundation in your reality.
It’s not inherently a bad thing to live in your reality. There is a lot to look forward to. It’s also not the worse thing to need an escape every now and then. I actually feel fortunate because of how easy it is to escape when I need to.
My shelves are lined with stories. And the world is filled with tales untold. I’m just working on my balance between listening and telling.