I hit that point in life where you start to realize that
boys are not yucky anymore. You start thinking that they are cute and what’s
even more jarring is that you want to be around them. You want them to talk to
you even though you are too shy to say anything to them.
I had little crushes all through grade school. I even wrote
a love letter to Josh Heckman and put it in his locker. I still remember him
coming charging into my fourth grade classroom not in hand with a sucker in his
mouth. He was so red and was shaking the note at me saying how ridiculous it
was. He was probably mortified and I know that it created awkwardness for us
until the day we graduated from high school, but I am still so proud of little
fourth grade Abby, standing up and having the courage to tell a boy that she
thought that not only was he cute, he was also an amazing soccer player. Ah,
young love. Young unrequited love, something that I had yet to actually learn
about.
I was not bothered by his less than enthusiastic response.
After all, I didn’t really expect anything. I just thought he was cute and I
wanted to tell him. So that was my first actual experience with “love,” a
little note in a locker that probably wound up in the bottom of his backpack
that day.
Grade school gave way to middle school and I retreated into
a shell, that brave, little girl who stuck a note in a locker all but disappeared.
I became shy and closed off. I wanted nothing to do with social situations and
I was terrible at talking to people I didn’t know. As a result of this, I
formed my new identity, shy, bookish girl who sat in the corner waiting for her
life to start.
The only constant in my life at this point was my best
friend and next door neighbor Kristen. We did not play like we did as grade
school children and our friendship seemed to further deteriorate when she had
the good fortune of experiencing her first boyfriend.
Middle school is the time of raging hormones, awkward school
dances and lots of growing up. Everyone was clumsy and we were all realizing
that we were no longer little kids. One of the byproducts of this growing up,
as we all soon learned was relationships.
Relationships for me were something that only the popular
girls in my grade had the privilege of experiencing. Even though we were only
in sixth grade, I knew lots of girls who had “boyfriends” including Kristen.
Now a boyfriend in sixth grade is pretty much limited to the
title aspect of the whole thing. You were middle school royalty if you had a
boy that you could call your boyfriend. Now, people didn’t date in middle
school, I don’t even think that Kristen and her boyfriend Daniel spent that
much time together outside of school, but she had a boyfriend and that was all
that mattered.
I was never resentful about this, I was just convinced that
I was just not the type of girl to have relationships. I was too quiet, too
weird, too boring, not pretty enough, on and on. So I was just happy to spend
my three years of middle school living vicariously through Kristen and Daniel’s
pseudo relationship of middle school.
The funny thing is that the things that girls talk about do
not really change from middle school to college. I spent a large amount of my
life in middle school talking about boys and boyfriends with my best friends
and I still do the exact same thing in college, it has just gotten a little
more real.
It had never really occurred to me that I wanted to be in a
relationship in sixth grade. I mean, sure, the thought had crossed my mind,
especially considering the fact that I was constantly talking to Kristen about
her boyfriend. But, I had not really been able to see myself in a relationship.
I guess that is the cool thing about being young, you have no idea what you are
“missing out” on, but all that changed when I was asked
on my first date ever.
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