paper rings | a songfic

in the street.

if i feel like allowing myself slightly more honesty, i'll trace it back to elementary school.

i had pigtails and you liked to wear under-armour athletic shorts and win playground basketball games that meant nothing in the long run but everything to addled seven-year-old brains.

you would play recess basketball with the boys and i would sit at the lone, rickety picnic table and long to be participating. but girls weren't allowed. it was a rule set, not by you and, really, not by anyone in our class, but boys in the years before us, long since having left our elementary school. but no one had thought to change the rule. the boys didn't really want the girls to play with them and muck everything up, and the girls were perfectly content to make flower crowns threaded through with loose strands of gossip. and i would sit at the picnic table, with my nose stuffed in a book, ignoring you.

i ignored the rest of them, too, because the girls thought i was too boyish and the boys thought i was too girlish and i couldn't seem to win so i stopped trying after a while. it was mutual avoidance, which was fine, for everyone except you. you pulled on my pigtails once because everyone else did it but gave up when i just glared and went back to scribbling something on the corner of our daily math assignment. when everyone else began to leave me alone, however, you kept showing up. you would sit next to me at lunch time, abandon the crowned basketball game to come ask me if what i was reading was actually any good, anyway, and offer to trade snacks at snack time whenever i got pretzels because you found out, somehow, that i didn't like them.

and so, by some kind of fucked up elementary schooler logic, i saw it only fit to ignore you, glare at you, and convince myself to hate you as much as a seven-year-old could manage. and if, occasionally, you pulled a laugh out of me or seemed to genuinely listen as i rambled about the same book you'd asked about the day before- well, that didn't matter.

but most of the time i would glare and you would play boys-only basketball and i would sit on my stupid picnic bench, waiting to see if you'd come talk to me today.

it was, in retrospect, a tricky game of cat-and-mouse that really didn't even make much sense because who was the cat and who was the mouse? maybe it was more like a tug-of-war: constant imbalance, insensibility, and elementary naivety come to a head with a proxy-feud that would eventually cave and collapse and make way for shaky friendship.