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Notebook:I fell for girls a lot when I was growing up. I had the advantage of not telling most of these girls I had fallen for them, which greatly reduced the risk of rejection and the complexity of our relationships. I was miserable nearly constantly as a result, but it was a straightforward, self-contained kind of misery.
I don't know when exactly girls got interesting. Late in grade school, 4th grade or so, but I'm sure there was a sort of gradual ramping-up in there: no lightswitch moment, "oh, girls!" to speak of. Just a slow realization that I wanted to be chased, I wanted to look at them, I wanted to make excuses to be around this or that girl no matter what otherwise boring activity or conversation might act as pretext.
But for eight years or so—napkin math gets me ages 9 through 17—I developed a series of not-at-all-monogomous crushes on girl after girl without ever admitting it verbally to any of them. Some may have known better than others, from more direct contact with me, but by and large I slipped under the radar. A romantic unknown.
I even had a girlfriend early in high school, a girl I had met the previous summer, but the only time I saw her was when I took her on an awkward, tense, confusing semi-date to a school dance. We talked on the phone often, about nearly nothing. She broke up with me in a letter, when she met a guy who actually made physical contact with her now and then, or had the brains to mention that she was very pretty and he liked her. These things were beyond me.
Eventually I began speaking more (that is, at all) directly to girls. I got involved with a couple, eventually even married one. One of the things that I realized once I'd made real contact with someone was that I'd been walking around for years idly hoping to run into some of these historic crushes, these long-lost girls: a sort of What If fantasy, amorphous but constantly running through my mind. And when I got a girl, that strange obsessive ferry eased off toward the horizon, and I was very aware, emotionally, of having watched it go. A quiet goodbye to that helpless, selfish treadmill of unspoken, unreflective need.
And so to all those girls who didn't know they were breaking my heart over the years: c'est la vie. C'est l'amour. You were pretty, and I liked you.