Crushed

 

I remember my first crush. Fourth grade. Michelle W. My teacher moved my desk next to hers. I'll never forget the first thing she said to me: "Great. I have to sit next to this baloney kid." But as time passed, I think we both kind of liked each other. Someone wrote 'I love you' in my notebook, then crossed it out, and I like to think it was her.

Eighth grade. Tracy C. kind of liked me and I really liked her. I never got the courage up to ask her out until we were seniors in college. She said no.

Sophomore year: Fifteen and awkward, this wonderful crazy girl starts talking to me out of the blue and I just can't wait to see her every day in English, but I was afraid to ask her out and she'd probably say no, and then one day I'm at the movies with my friends and she's in the row ahead of me shouting advice to the movie characters, but she's there with some guy who wasn't that much better looking than me, and then some jerk usher got in my face because my ticket was for Wayne's World and not the R-rated Lawnmower Man, which was a lousy movie anyway.

Or the wonderful coworker who went out of her way to befriend me when I moved to her town at 25, though made it clear that she had a boyfriend. But then she starts calling me in the middle of the night crying, talking about how mean her boyfriend is to her, and even though I have to work the next day, I'd take a cab out to her place so she could cry on my shoulder. And I wanted to say that I'd never treat her like that but refused to be that guy and then by the end of the week, she'd be back with him, because he played college ball and I couldn't compete with that.

I conclusion, love stinks. Except for my wife, the best person in the world.