It was in High School I fell in love for the first time. She was a new arrival in town and at our school. Her family moved to our town from a similar small town in South Australia. For those of you who don’t believe in love at first sight, you just haven’t experienced it yet. This girl was the prettiest thing I have ever seen. Amie her name was. Long Natural Blonde hair, slightly tanned skin and just the most attractive smile I have ever seen. I was smitten immediately. So what does a boy with zero confidence do in this situation? He doesn’t just walk up and ask the girl out. In his brain he comes up with the most elaborate plan ever. We only shared a couple of classes so I decided to manufacture a situation where she would have to sit next to me. It took a few tries but it eventually happened.
What happened next changed my little boring teenage life forever. She was just as weird and crazy as me! We liked the same things; we both had the same sense of humour. OMG I had no idea what was happening to me. I had never felt like this. I wanted to be sitting next to her 24 hours a day. I guess that’s the power of love for real hey? So what happened was we became best friends in a very short space of time. She would ring me up most days after school and we would talk for hours. But of course I never had the confidence to take the next step and ask her to go out with me. I was so afraid of rejection. A fear I still carry around with me today. So what happened next was heart breaking.
My best mate at the time, well mates isn’t the right term, associates was more like it, decided to ask out Amie and she said yes. I was shattered. I pretended to be happy for them etc. They made the strangest pair. I could tell that Amie didn’t really like him that much but whatever. Our friendship continued to grow and grow. She would come over to my house after school and I would go to hers. All this whilst she was going out with this other guy. It was weird but still I didn’t have the guts to tell her how I really felt. Anyways she eventually realized that the guy was a bit of a cockhead and dumped his sorry ass and this made me happy.
So months passed by and I psyched myself into revealing my feelings on Valentine’s Day. I wrote a poem and made a card and was all excited. I left the card on her locker and ran away and waited for the reaction. When she approached me the look on her face said it all. You could see the disappointment in her eyes. I got the old “you’re an awesome guy and such a good friend, but I don’t like you in that way” speech. The first of many from various female friends over the years. It really messed with my head. It wasn’t Amie’s fault; I don’t blame her in any way. It put a stop to our friendship for a while. We managed to re-establish it again but it was never quite the same. I still ached for her every day. It wasn’t until about a year after I moved to Melbourne I was able to get her out of my mind.
Looking at the whole thing from a psychoanalytic point of view I think it is possibly one of the main reasons I have become such a prolific punter. It is much less likely you will be rejected when you are paying somebody for their time. It is also the reason why I have never approached anybody and asked them out I suppose. I think I live in a little padded bubble never moving out of my comfort zone. I know it’s a cop out to blame my Adult awkwardness on this one incident but I feel if she had agreed to go out with me there and then in year 12 I would be a much different person today. Maybe I wouldn’t be so broken?
Incidentally I have bumped into to Amie a few times over the past 13 years. Once I was on the train to work and she sat down opposite me and started talking to me. Was weird. She still looked as gorgeous as ever. She was engaged at the time. Still very bubbly but seemed to have lost the twinkle in her eye that I remember so fondly. Saw her a few times on the train but then I moved and haven’t seen her since. I tracked her down on facebook and one Saturday night a couple of months ago I was at home alone drinking champagne and she started talking to me on Facebook chat. Turns out she has moved back to our hometown and is Single and seemed unhappy. I indicated that when I get back there we should catch up for a drink. She said she would like that. See how easy it is? Why couldn’t I have known this 14 years ago?
TO BE CONTINUED…
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