I haven’t had that many crushes, so there are few to recall, but one in particular sticks out in my mind.
It’s so silly really, I was 10 years old, chubby little brunette, nothing special or out of the ordinary. I was shy and nervous and didn’t have a large group of friends, preferring to keep myself to myself. My sister and I, identical twins, but still different. She had more confidence and was so much thinner than me, I, as you can imagine was green with envy. We went to school, as normal, nothing different about the day, same routine as always. When we arrived we were greeted by the usual flock of students, all except one. A little blonde boy had arrived in our class, seemingly as shy as me, blue eyes and glasses stared around at us all, incredibly nervous. As he settled in to the class he joined our circle of friends, and I found myself thinking that he was cute, I was intrigued by him purely because he was as shy and quiet as me, and I loved having someone around who I could relate to.
It sounds so ridiculous because we were only 10, but we went on a school trip for a week, to the Isle of Wight, a little Island about a half an hour boat ride from Portsmouth on the south coast of England. It wasn’t a long journey for us at all because of where we were from, but being 10 it felt like years! During our stay we got to know each other better and decided to “go out” (basically this consisted of gingerly holding each others hands around the playground, and being the only member of the opposite sex that each of us could stand).
As it came to the time for us to leave primary school and move onto secondary school, we swapped addresses to keep in touch, as I was going to an all girls school and he an all boys school. We wrote to each other every week, learning more and more about each other, this went on for 3 years, still proclaiming that we were “going out” not that we saw each other once, both of us thinking that we had a strong, lasting relationship. We decided to “break up” when we were 13 realising that we were too different and as we never saw each other it was pointless. Looking back now it was so ridiculous! We didn’t see each other again until we were 16, and everything was awkward, gone was the friendship we had at 10 years old, replaced by a weird atmosphere of discontent. We started to talk again and eventually he confessed that he still liked me, even though it sounded ridiculous to me, we started up our “correspondence” again. I began to develop a fresh crush on him, much to the amusement of my friends, as we had nothing in common. When I was 17, I discovered why this crush was indeed inexplicable, because he was sending me emails saying how much he liked me and wanted to ask me out while; in the meantime he was screwing my best friend, unbeknownst to me. The same friend who had been telling me to go for it, despite our clear differences. Basically he was a scumbag and I was worth so much more, I was just stupid enough to think that the childhood fantasies you have when “dating” boys for a few days would ever be real. I felt so ridiculous, and annoyed that someone I had known so well could be so hurtful to me. Maybe that was what intrigued me about him when we first met, I’d never met a scumbag before.
