Write about your first crush.
I don’t know how many people remember their first crush, or the first person they liked. I mean, I guess it depends on when it happened, or at what point in your life you started noticing those you were attracted to. But, come to think of it, I’m not sure if this was even anything to do with attraction, because I was only in the fourth grade.
It must have been 1993, or 1994. I was born in 1985, so the years kind of match up with where I was, I think?
At the time, I was an avid Goosebumps reader, and there was a girl who liked to lend me her copies … that I didn’t take very good care of. I was an inconsiderate 9-year-old. I was also very bad at picking up on social cues, as I still am, in 2024.
Needless to say, I didn’t like the Goosebumps-book-having girl, or, I should say, I didn’t want her to be my fourth grade girlfriend, and I couldn’t tell that she wanted me to ask her to be that. I was just borrowing her books, reading them, and giving them back. It was a beneficial friendship for me at the time, and that’s all I saw it as.
The girl I did like was a girl named Lauren. I guess it was a crush. I don’t much remember what she looked like back then, but that’s okay. We were all very young children going to school at Millersburg, PA elementary. I don’t remember exactly how long I had this crush, but I do remember asking her to be my girlfiend … in the middle of the classroom, in front of everyone.
I think this is where my phobia of rejection comes from.
To my question, she said, in front of the entire class, that I wasn’t her type. Where a 9-year-old learned that phrase, “You’re not my type.” in 1994 is well beyond my comprehension.
It was probably one of my more embarrassing moments as a child. My second most embarrassing moment was burning a babysister’s coffee pot on her oven, just because I was messing around with the burner dials.
Fast-forward to around 2007 or 2008, by random chance, she showed up on my Myspace. It was like some kind of ridiculous coincidence. And I remember, I also found her attractive as an adult. But I think at the time she either had a boyfriend, or she was married.
It’s not that being married is bad or anything, but I guess I had, for years and years, this image in my mind that she was the first person I was ever “interested” in, and that seeing her as an adult could have been a fresh chance at trying again. And that was all kind of deflated. I wouldn’t call it devastating, she wasn’t and hadn’t ever been part of my life, but it’s a theme with most of my relationships, that what I want and what I expect is rarely what reality is.
Where my first crush is, today, in 2024, is anyone’s guess. Maybe she moved to California, maybe she’s rich and living it up in some remote part of the world. Or maybe she’s just like me now, thinking about crushes and past relationships and the nature of all of these things that bring us to where we are now…
Writing on a blog about our first crushes.
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