this is a little weird one because i’m looking at the essays i’ve written recently and realizing it’ll take me a bit to get through the next one i want to write and i feel like, it’s a good idea, to have something in between. so take this personal essay about bad crushes i had in high school. maybe it’ll be illuminating or at least kind of funny!
i wanted to write a little essay about the boys i had crushes on when i was in high school and also looking back at past me in a sort of loving retrospective, and i am going to do that, but i didn’t realize how hard it is to be compassionate to past me. and i’m not even talking about the past me of recent years that actively Fucked Up in several ways that impacted other people’s lives, but the past me that was like 16 years old and painfully awkward. somehow i feel an ire towards that version of myself but for now at least i need to banish it so i can talk about crushes.
anyway as previously noted i was a fucking mess of a teenager. i was neck-deep in weird shit, didn’t know how to talk to people on good days, had a blog circa 2009 that was Bad, had friends who (save one or two who i am still v much ride or die for) treated me analogous to a chew toy, etc etc. in their defense, that had been the status quo since grade 2. that in itself is a good argument against k-12 schools. please stay tuned for my upcoming ted talk on the subject.
so i was weird! i was very much in the throes of puberty! i was writing fanfiction about hot anime boys kissing more different hot anime boys! and holy fucking hell i had crushes that were so powerful they can only be described as life-altering. there were primarily three of them, occasionally branching out and mutating into weird para-crushes that never went anywhere. not that the life-altering crushes themselves went anywhere, but that’s to be assumed.
the first one, we’ll call him Tom. he had been a long slow burn of a crush, the object of my vague affections since probably grade 4, the first crush i can remember. i was absolutely terrified of speaking to him. this was both because of the crush and because he was solidly Cool- he went skateboarding! he played Instruments Of Band! he liked The Cool Music! in my head, he was the epitome of out of my league, but that didn’t stop me from awkwardly trying to make friends. it didn’t really stick, mostly because we were very different people and my inability to speak to him without squeaking up a few octaves didn’t exactly make for an endearing conversation.
this will become a theme.
Tom was the focus of all this pre-teen turmoil for a few years, until a new kid joined the class above mine. we’ll call him, uh, Ben. he was short, kind of dweeby looking (i’m sorry! that’s mean!), and for some reason i thought he was the coolest person to ever exist. this infatuation only increased with time, in a way deeply divergent from the Tom situation. why? the fantastic medium of MSN messenger. while i was still heartbreakingly shy in person- wouldn’t make eye contact, wouldn’t speak more than a few words directly to him, would give him about as wide a berth as humanly possible- i would log on every afternoon when i got home from school and talk to him through the far less nervewracking medium of text. as i actually Spoke Words to him, i found out we had things in common such as Liking Anime. wow! he burned me a cd of the Strokes! wow! i asked his opinion on things! wow! he asked me my opinion on things! WOW!
this continued for three years. seriously. from grade 8 to grade 11 i talked to this poor boy solely online, despite going to various places together for quiz bowl competitions and generally being part of parallel friend groups. we legitimately could have been friends, for all the things we had in common. we even both read the same webcomics. for god’s sake, looking back it was Painful the way i kept him at arm’s length- not that he wanted to be any closer, necessarily. Ben’s the one crush out of the three that i really desperately want to get back in touch with, just to see what the hell happened to him and why we both couldn’t make a dang friendship happen like regular human beings. all the parts were there!
it’s worth noting that in grade 11 my best friend at the time started dating Ben. we were all in a play together (yes i was a drama kid, i mentioned at the beginning of all this that i was embarrassing to be around) and the resulting anguish from seeing them be lovey dovey together made me perform a bona-fide cry marathon: crying myself to sleep, waking up and immediately crying once more, only stopping around noon that day. it’s still to this day the only time i’ve cried that much. impressive! i ended up stopping the record-setting cry just because too many people were asking what was wrong and i had had enough of explaining “oh it’s nothing” because i was sixteen and in no universe was i going to be vulnerable enough to explain what had happened.
i also have a distinct memory from around that time that’s stuck in my head because of how pathetically sad it was. like, the sort of memory that makes me want to go back in time and give past me a pep talk and a single reese’s cup. in said memory me and my friend and ben and several other cast members from the play we all were in are driving to someone’s house for the post-play party. i am crammed in the backmost seat of ben’s suv, knees to my chin, breath making fog on the window. it is dark outside. ben is playing animal collective on the car stereo. i go “oh! i love this album!” and am soundly ignored. i see my friend reach across the console and hold ben’s hand. i feel like the earth is going to open up a special maw just for me and suck me in.
of course, no maws opened and we kept driving and i continued to feel flattened by the sheer agony of teenage emotion, which i admit is a pretty lacklustre end to a brief memory. but that’s just how it was! nothing ever built to a head- nothing ever went anywhere. just brief flirtations with social interactions that never landed.
that same year i developed the third crush, which was on a boy that we’ll call Yves. (why not! let’s get fun with the fake names.) this was the first time a crush had smacked me across the face with its sudden intensity, which i attribute to me being sixteen and never having so much as held hands with anybody. yves was in the same friend group as ben and tom, which is not a surprise looking back. i didn’t talk to him at all. not in person, not over text, nothing. he was a mystery who by all accounts didn’t like me very much. this i cannot blame him for.
it’s kind of a repeating situation where the people i desperately, desperately wanted to like me back in the day were all various levels of repulsed by my existence. i know now that it’s probably solely because i was so obviously desperate to be liked; i also know that this was probably a good thing. if any of them had returned the affection i had for them i’d have been like a fisherman landing a fish far too big for the boat: standing with this massive thing in my hands trying to figure out what the fuck to do with it before it inevitably flings itself overboard. there was a safety in the fantasy, a relief knowing that i would never get close enough to actually be in danger or hurt or anything.
not that that all kept me from wanting to melt and scream and die upon being told i had to hug yves as part of the aforementioned play i was in. oh my god, i must have laid awake for nights on end sweating bullets about it. the forbidden hug! the following thoughts about somehow seducing him through the hug! the daydreaming about listening to neutral milk hotel together! the anguish upon knowing he had a girlfriend! all of this, too intense for my teenage heart to bear!
so instead i wrote more fanfiction about boys kissing boys and tried not to think about it. but i thought about it. i burned mix cds for both yves and ben, probably with songs they had already heard of on them, but i was determined to at least come off as some level of Cool. i did not, of course. which is fine.
so what’s the point of all of this? why revisit a part of my life that feels so overwhelming? it’s not like any of these crushes were notable in the grand scheme of things. by the time yves and ben graduated, i had simmered down considerably and ended up simply appreciating my crush on tom from afar so as to Not Be Weird. i also stopped writing fanfiction, started listening to modest mouse more, and essentially checked myself the fuck out from whatever was going on at school. and then i moved for university and well that’s a whole other chestnut.
i want to think about these crushes because i think they’re a) funny and b) important. a lot of the things that these boys had- /mu/ music tastes, skateboarding ability, a certain social rhythm- were things i also desperately wanted. it took a while for me to be able to step far back enough to see that. and when i did, it sort of crystallized some gender stuff i’d been having for a while. but this isn’t so much about the gender stuff- i mean, it is, but i don’t want to write about it right now. there’s only so many times you can say “yeah i figured the gender out when i was seventeen” and then tell the whole ass story before you get a little bored of the rigamarole. point here is i figured it out because i wanted to be my crushes more than i wanted to be with them.
i had no intention of ever dating any of these boys. like previously noted, they were just really big fish that i was trying to catch out of pure curiosity. i liked them, they seemed cool, i wanted to be their friend, but the only way to do that in my mind was to view it all through the lens of Romance. what Romance was, i had no idea. i just had a fishing rod and an internet connection and a surplus of social energy.
that’s high school, babey!! anyway thanks for reading as always, mwah mwah, and stay tuned for the next installation of… free jazz. (v2!)