Following Impulses, pt. 2

Alright, before you read this post, you need to read this post. Trust me.

Let me clarify something real quick about the compulsion to check back on each of these secret crushes. I have reason to believe that they both had crushes on me. I'll relate the story of the college one only now, we'll save the high school one for later.


I was a freshman in college, and I had a thing for surfer chicks. I also continue to have a thing for freckles. Lo and behold, as I am going to a pre-freshman year leadership course, I meet a freckle faced surfer chick. I get her number, and when I call her, bad thing #1 occurs to me. Her roommate is the only other girl from my high school that went to my college. Normally this wouldn't be such a bad thing, but apparently she had a crush on me, and instead of taking her to prom, I asked and took her best friend (come on, one has to be sincere). I guess it was all the worse that she was the senior student body president, so she was able to plan and do all the work for prom, then stay at home and cry her eyes out...by herself (okay, now I'm sounding like a bad guy even to myself, especially because I was "just friends" with her best friend--I just didn't want to send the Pres. a message that I was interested).

Anyway, I call her on the phone, we hang out, whatever. I had never kissed a girl (I had been kissed twice, but that's another great story), and it was because I had this huge irrational fear of closing my eyes and leaning in and kissing a girl's nose. As we were talking one night, surfer chick (who is my ex-college crush) somehow managed to get me to confess this. After that, she said, "Well, I wish that the boy that I like would just kiss me, but he's scared to kiss a girl. What do you think about that?" Well, I thought, "She's talking about me," and I asked her out. She said yes, and it was looking good. Just to double check things, I asked her roommate if, when she was talking about that boy was who was scared to kiss girls, she was talking about me. "Umm, I dunno, you might want to check with her," was the response that I got. So I called her back and said, "Hey Surfer Chick, when you were talking about that guy that you like that's scared to kiss you, you were talking about me, right?" Her response, "No." Immediately I explained that I had misread her and called off the date. Also, I became very cynical towards girls for the rest of my freshman year, and declared that skiing was my new girlfriend.

As I've talked to various girls about what happened, I heard two different things. 1 -- What a mean girl/tease. 2 -- She was into you, she just freaked out when you called her on it and denied everything. I would like to believe that the 2nd option is true. But then again, I have gone through a lot of self-torment about the situation that will have been totally in vain if I ever find out that the 2nd option is true.

The story continues. After serving a 2 year mission for the LDS church in Brazil, I ran into her again. Now, on that mission, we weren't supposed to have any girlfriendy relationships with chicks, so I was rusty. She ran into me at the library and the conversation went like this: "MyFakename!" "Oh, yeah, surfer chick." I looked at her for a moment, decided that I had no idea what to do, nor was I comfortable in the slightest with the situation, then I walked away, once again pretending like she didn't exist.

I guess I've had relatively low self-esteem with the ladies. I'm not totally sure why. Let me just put it this way--the first time I ever held a girl's hand, I was 21, and we'd already been dating for 5 months. After that, it took me another month and a half to kiss her. I'm a bit of a slow mover. Tonight, hanging out with friends, I was still feeling sick, and so I decided to come home and go to bed. I checked my Facebook account and I had one new message. It said,

Hi!
OF COURSE I had a crush on you. Please, like who didn't? Although 7 years and 500 miles separate us, I probably am still fatally attracted to you.
Fakename.

I've added a couple of extra hard returns here to verbally symbolize the awkard silence that filled my red red ears. And my face was red... very red. Glad I didn't publish this note on Facebook.

Then, I must admit, I started smiling (how could I not? Those were her exact words). AND at that very moment this song began playing on iTunes (fyi, the song is called "I've Never Found A Girl" by Eddie Floyd, from the Stax-O'-Soul sampler, which I got from DeaconBlues1103's excellent blog)...

Yeah, so... it was all too perfect. I wonder how many times we beat ourselves up over something that's really nothing? Or assume the absolute worst about something when it may very well be the absolute opposite? I think I probably do it quite a bit. Also... now... I am glad that I did one of those things that I normally don't do. This whole "living life balls out" thing has been pretty good, so far. Honestly, even before this happened, it just felt better, to take those chances and say those things and whatnot. Lastly, 7 years can be covered in a single sentence ("Good, but lonely."), but how fast can I cover 500 miles?

PS - It took forever to find a embeddable flash player for audio, so let me know if you want the code. And lastly, I really miss being able to indent? Anyone know how to do it?