All I Never Wanted

Part One, Chapter Four - A Dress and an Unexpected Light

 When I was around fourteen, I had my first major crush. When you are that age, you honestly look at someone and want them. No matter what they’re like. No matter how much they might despise you. No matter how incompatible you are. All logic is overridden by a gnawing urge to simply have. But to have what exactly? Even if my wishes had come true and he had fought past crushing social stigma to ask me out, I wouldn’t even have known what to do with him. I wasn’t stupid. I knew the best looking, sporty, popular guy regarded me to be as interesting as a maths re-sub. Julian was not sporty. He was not popular.

He wasn’t classically good looking, but more interesting in his looks. Like I could notice something new every time I looked at him across the class room. I could notice that his nose wasn’t entirely straight, but curved up a little at the end. I could notice that his hair wasn’t entirely straight either, but curled a little around the backs of his ears. It wasn’t his nose or his curls that I first noticed. They came from the secret glances that I hope to God no one noticed and they came from the longing, shameless stares that I indulged in because I needed to. I first noticed Julian on his second day of class. The first day had passed unremarkably. It was a new kid, sure, but last night had been a particularly bad one, with Alan and Mum shouting at each other. Then they woke the neighbours up and they shouted at them. And then Alan shouted back. Davey had also gotten out of bed and told everyone to shut the fuck up because he had a test the next day. Both Alan and Mum shouted at Davey. By the time Julian arrived at our college the next morning, my head was ringing with shouting, my head fixated with angry, twisted faces. The love of my life for the next year walked in and I barely registered it.

 Twenty-four hours later, however, I knew exactly who and what Julian Reinner was. Double drama usually meant one hundred minutes of screwing around, but that day we were to devise a short piece around a given genre. Who and what I was saddled with has faded, with vague tinges of embarrassment left behind. Julian’s group were asked to do a film noir piece. The first bit was rubbish, just the other boys being morons, pretending to shoot each other. With thirty seconds left, Julian walked on stage. I can’t remember what he said and did, but I remember how I felt. Because how I felt was how he felt. He looked around the room and I was there with him, in his head, waging whatever war he was waging. The power and surety of his performance had us shutting up for once. The way he spoke his lines were like they were the words he had planned to say his whole life.

 The next few months were months of longing. Instead of imagining being in another house, lying awake beside Davey, I’d go straight to my own bed and concoct precious perceptions of Julian and I. Julian and I in the park. Julian and I holding hands at the movies. Julian meeting me by my locker after class. They’d sing me, mind bloated and fluffy with desire, to sleep.

When people say they have had their heart broken, they usually mean by a spouse, or a long-time partner. It would seem strange and naïve to say that I had my heart broken by a boy who engaged in five glorious conversations with me. I do mean it, however, that my heart was broken slowly by him. A slow, seeping realization. Like sitting on grass and only feeling its wet when you feel the cold and damp on your skin. I realized that the jokes the rest of the class made – my pining had not gone unnoticed- didn’t enlighten him, more embarrassed him. I plotted, schemed and waited for opportunities to make him notice me. For each time it’d go unnoticed, I would sag a little. By September, I was despairing. I couldn’t understand how something so potent, so palpable could go unseen. By the end of the school year, I walked out the door with mediocre exam marks, distant friends and absolutely drained. I simply had nothing left to give. I had a silly notion that maybe because he didn’t want my love, I could keep it. But that was not the case – whether he wanted it or not, I expelled it out of me. To whom or to where it vanished, I know not. All I know is that it was a long time until I could look at Julian again and not feel fatigued.