The year is 1993, who knows what day, or month, or season, all that is irrelevant. I am five, or turning 5, the first time I see him. He is 10, a whole life time older than I, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we will never meet, he and I.
I see him everyday but he will never see me. He’s a rebel. Never does anything by the book and hates school. I find him funny, my parents warn me that his behaviour is wrong and irresponsible, of course they use ‘five-year-old-talk’ in the form of, ‘now honey what he does is bad and if you do that you won’t be allowed to go to your friends house this weekend’, or ‘if you are naughty like him you won’t get any dessert’. Small childish threats that scare me more than the boogey man. I don’t know that what I’m feeling is a crush…
…maybe it’s not a crush, but at five, what do I know? I know that I think about him; I know that I imagine us playing in playground at school together; I know that I pretend that I am in his world and he is in mine; but most of all I pretend that we are married. But then again, which child doesn’t imagine they are married and plays mummies and daddies with their friends or brothers and sisters? I know that it has been three months since I first saw him and since my obsession began.
I tell my mother one night as she tucks me in to bed. She just smiles and wishes me goodnight and sweet dreams. I dream that night that we are in the playground again, playing in the sandbox. We are having fun building sand castles and playing king and queen. I wake up happy, and then I realise it was a dream and I am sad because in real life we will never meet.
I don’t know when I stopped this obsession for him, I just know it came to an end soon after I turned six. It wasn’t a sad thing, it just gradually happened. I stopped thinking about him everyday, and the dreams stopped. When I first saw him I was five and he was ten. Now I am 19, and he remains that same ten year old boy I first met over almost 15 years ago. I grew up and moved on, but he never did. His world doesn’t allow him to grow, for he is nothing more than a sketch in time. This young boy who wears the same red shirt and blue shorts everyday; whose father works in a power plant; whose mother has blue hair; whose sister, at eight, is smarter than them all. This young boy, named Bart Simpson, was my first, yet unconventional, crush…I think. I look back at that time and laugh at myself young five year old self; but I also look back at that time and remember the great time my five year old self had pretending to be married to Bart Simpson. Now my cushes are real men, who I can touch and feel and have real conversations with, and who can touch and feel and converse with me. Oh the days of childhood innocence and crushes are over.
