Yeah, what the hell, another one.

I like writing these, so I'll give it another shot:

Senior year of high school was strange new terrain. Junior year I had finally shifted from boney-skin-thin-tall-kid to slightly-thicker-but-still-relatively-thin-tall-kid. Essentially, from Third-World corpse to Iggy Pop. I had started doing theater, met new people, and began to build a delicate film of confidence where none had existed before. Also, John Mayer had recently released his new hit single "Your Body is a Wonderland", and as his image circulated the media, brown-haired sensitive kids with really intense eyebrows were finally considered "cute". Essentially, where girls had showed little to no interest in me before, there were now some slight blips on the periphery.

The problem with that was, junior year I had just ended my first real relationship and had no idea how to read "signals". Signals were cryptic, impossible to decipher. What kinds of compliments or gestures of affection were considered "friendly" and which were considered...well, more than friendly? Not to mention the fact that certain girls were flirtier than others, and that their gestures should be taken with little to no degree of seriousness. How could I possibly ever understand it all?

This was junior year. By senior year, things were getting less perplexing, but by no means did I ever do anything about it. Somehow or another, girls were taking notice of me, but I never had the balls to really do anything about it.

(Interpolation: In my last post where I told a personal story, I used a pseudonym because no one reading this blog would ever really know who I was talking about unless it was the parties involved. Now, anyone who glances at this thing who happened to go to high school with me will know who I'm talking about. So let's drop pseudonyms and say what's real here. I haven't spoken to this girl in almost three years, so why bother covering this up.)

Enter one Alana Zonan. Alana was funny, sarcastic, pretty, and a damn good actress. We'd been in a bunch of shows together. I was fucking smitten. But there were two problems:

1) Alana was really open about the fact that she was sexually experienced. I, on the other hand, was still pretty much a quivering bitch when it came to sexual experience. Intimidation ran through my blood like salmon filling a mountain stream.

2) Alana was part of the more "in" crowd at high school. I was not. I sat around on friday nights with my friends and played boggle. She'd go to parties and drink. What else she did I don't know, because I was never invited to these high school parties. My experience with them is precisely nill.

So, not only was I more intimidated than she, but we actually had a social barrier between us. None of my friends were her friends. She'd drank, had sex, smoked weed, who knows what else. I had done none of these things.

Junior year Matt would have stayed on the peripheries and kept this little crush to himself. But senior year Matt had that wonderful little film-thin layer of confidence. He might, just might, try to pursue something. But unfortunately, he'd do it in the lamest way possible: he'd write her a note.

I wrote her a fucking love-letter. I cringe right now just thinking about it. It was really intense, too, filled with similes and really involved metaphors...God, I just hate thinking about it, it was such a miscalculated move. I was going to woo her with my gift for the pen? Fuck that shit. This was the era of Li'l John's "Get Low", and I thought I was going to be Cyrano fucking de Bergerac.

After a rehearsal, I asked if she could give me a ride home. The whole car ride was spent talking about bullshit, avoiding the subject at hand. When she finally pulled into my driveway I kissed her on the cheek. She scrunched up her eyebrows and pursed her lips in the way people do when they know they're going to have to do something unkind to someone simple and nice. I don't remember the conversation very well, but I remember things going around in circles and I remember Outkast playing on the stereo. She'd convince me that it was ridiculous for us to get together because her friends would just shun me, and then I'd say "yeah, it was a stupid move on my part", and then she'd get really confusing and told me it wasn't stupid. I still to this day don't know why she said that, whether she was actually interested but didn't want to get involved because she knew her friends, or because she was just trying to let me down easy. Either way, I left the car hung my head especially low, and listened to Radiohead for an hour or two.

A few weeks later, a joke was made about me having a crush on Alana. I realized very quickly that everyone fucking knew about this note. She'd probably told one or two people, only to have it spread throughout the whole theater-kid system (which was pretty extensive at my school). Everyone knew about my embarrassing level of sincerity toward this girl, and God did I hate myself because of it.

It was a crushing blow, to be certain, but everyone needs one of these things early on. It just happened to be particularly public for me. But I assure you, I've moved on, and there's no hard feelings whatsoever. Especially since Alana and I haven't spoken in about three years.