Within my fifteen years of life, I have had nothing even resembling a fling, and I’m glad. Might as well save it for when I’m older. Adult flings are always more interesting.
Crushes are a different story, though. I am not your average teenage girl when it comes to crushes, and I’ve never quite figured out why. I’ve always been able to tell the difference between when I like someone and when I just think they’re hot. Like many other teenage girls, I’ve often found myself eying a hot stranger or staring at the cute guy in Science class.
Actually liking someone is a different game for me, though. It takes a lot to get me to like someone, and I never really have “crushes.” I either simply like the way they look or I completely fall in “like” with them. There has never really been a gray area for me. v
So far in my life, there has only been one exception to that custom of mine that I can recall. Some college’s concert band was touring California for a few months, and they stopped to do a little performance fifth and sixth periods in the band room at my school. I was able to get out of class to watch it, and anything was better than having to sit through another dreadfully boring English class. The band was set up in the center of the room, and the audience sat in chairs that were all along the edge of the room, facing the band. I found myself a chair near the edge of the brass section and was ready for two hours of relaxation to end the school day.
The band was very good, but when it’s the afternoon in a warm band room that’s packed with people near the end of a long school day, there’s only a certain amount of attention I can give, no matter what’s going on. I was beginning to space out and go off into a fuzzy daydream, when a trumpet player five chairs down from the row I was sitting near caught my eye. The first thing I noticed was his hair. It was incredibly light blond, and was piled on his head in that kind of chaotic, messy, perfect-looking way. I mean, this guy had near-perfect hair that seriously rivaled Patrick Dempsey’s, and that was a big thing in my book.
Then I caught glimpse of his eyes, which were a radiant lightish-brown and made me want to just gaze into them all day. Once I looked at the rest of him, I was pleased to find that he was quite good-looking, and I could see the outline of his biceps below the cuff of his rolled-up sleeves. The performance suddenly got a lot more interesting. Almost immediately after my discovery of this god-like creature, a few of the band members had to switch seats because they were playing different parts for the next song. My handsome stranger got up and moved majestically to the chair along the edge of the band that was about two and a half feet away from me.
I quickly looked away, not wanting him to see me gushing over him, but once the band began playing again, my eyes found their way back to him. I would stare for a bit, then look away, feeling weird, and I’d end up looking back at him again soon after. I noticed his ears occasionally moved up and down when he was playing, and it made me think he was all the more adorable and lovely. I was paying attention more than I had been all afternoon, but it was more towards my guy and his cute little ear shifts than the music. I found myself fantasizing about what would happen if he and I, in some alternate universe, were together. By the time the performance had ended, I was mentally picking out baby names.
It wasn’t until after the final bell rang that I realized what had happened. That I, Miss “No, I really don’t like anyone right now!”, Miss “It takes a lot for me to like a guy,” had just spent the past hour and a half thinking anything and everything about a college boy I knew absolutely nothing about! I summed it up to the fact that I was simply bored and had nothing better to think about, but I couldn’t make the feeling go away that there was something different about him. I thought about him a bit for a couple weeks, but he soon got lost in my memories.I think that was the closest I have ever gotten to having a real crush. Not just eye candy, not falling straight into “like,” but somewhere in between.
