Today I met him, the boy in the middle of this whole love story.
Back in eight grade of my schooling, I had a huge crush on him.
Actually, when I say huge, it’s a complete understatement. I had a gargantuan crush on that guy.
It was like one of those fairytale love stories your grandmother would have made up, to convince you to get married.
I believed in that fairytale. I believed in love, and him, just as much.
During my pinky frilly days (minus the pink and frill, realistically I was a tomboy), I was the goon in school, and a good one at that.
I bullied my schoolmates who picked on nice kids like me. You know the ones, spotty, wearing cheap plastic glasses that covered more than just the eyes, the whole face really.
As cool as we considered ourselves to be, in reality my friends and I were actually the dorky geeks of the school. My pals and I were uncool and shunned by the so called “cooler people”.
On the contrary, the teachers loved geeks like me. We had the best grades, the simplest hairstyles and we were the best-behaved children. But I was also good at sports. Sports were given a lot of importance in our school and sportsmen in my school were like the quarterbacks in Hollywood teen movies. They were the idols. My spectacles never came between me and my star status. Until I fell in love.
If you were to ask me about the whole deal now, I would call it silly.
But then, I never felt silly. It was a serious and dramatic chapter for me in my life.
The beginning of my true love story
I remember the day when I first saw him and it feels like it was just yesterday. My friends and I were walking on the loggia and then, just like in one of the H-Town mush movies, time just stood still. The dry leaves stopped in midair and so did the rest of the world. He was coming from the other side with his pals. He was so handsome, so dashing and so all that. Who was he? He was a senior, and two years older than me. I got to know that later that day.
Where there is a will, there is a way, especially when it comes to information. I was in eighth grade and he was in tenth grade. Wow! His class was very close to the ladies’ room. I started frequenting the loo so much that my teacher had to send me to the sick room to check if I had some bladder infection. She was right, I did have an infection. It was love.
Within no time I had all the information about him. He had an elder brother who was married. He lived near the city hall. And he went by the route ‘3’ bus. Sadly, I went home by route ‘1’ bus.
I tried going once by route ‘3’ bus. He was there, reclining in the back seats, talking and flirting with his girlfriends. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. To make things worse, going by route ‘3’ meant that I had to walk four miles back home.I wanted him to know that I liked him but at times, I wanted the secret to die with me. Now I wonder if that was limerence or true love I was feeling for him. I guess there was that bit of girliness underneath my skin of a tomboy. How could I tell him, should I even tell him, and other questions along those lines became more important to me than algebra and differentiation.
I loved him, I was sure of that then. I wanted to marry him and live happily ever after. All this, without ever knowing whether there was a girl in his life or whether he would ever like me. I was pretty sure he would like me. He was supposed to. Everyone liked me. Why wouldn’t he? I could never summon the courage to tell him.
The days passed and I passed into my ninth grade. Now I was a big girl who was trying to hide the tomboy in the closet. I was a girl who was trying to be a girl. I grew my hair despite my battles with the comb. My skirt got shorter and my socks got lower. Although I wasn’t allowed to wax in my traditional school, I didn’t have to worry about that. I had great legs. I wanted to lure him with my beauty. I was beautiful although I wore glasses.
