The emotionally tormented canine
As I write this at 2:37 am I am still full of the emotions that I felt this morning, frustration, shyness, surprise, insecurity, annoyance, and quite possibly love somewhere in the mix. The reason all of it comes from one person that I did not expect (or even want) to see at my cousin’s high school graduation.
Lets rewind back to my sophomore year in high school. I fell in love with a girl in my class and I tried my best to get her to become my girlfriend. We would have funny conversations during class in our sophomore year and I would walk her to her car and chat with her during our junior year. Hell, I managed to get her to go with me to our junior prom. But looking bad at it now, I realize that she just did it out of pity. On our senior year, she finally told me that she wasn’t interested in me at all. Like the good kids that we were, we ended our friendship on a neutral note. That said, the rest of the school year was hard on me because our class was small and I had a couple of classes with her. I bit my lip and moved on but it wasn’t until 2 years after graduating did I finally stop thinking about her. Much to my annoyance, she shows up in my dreams every now and then.
This morning, I was walking to the church where my cousin’s graduation was being held when I spotted a familiar body frame in the distance. I thought it was just a random occurance and that that person just has the same body shape and hair style as the girl I knew. Then as I got closer to the building, my heart (and mood) sunk as it was undeniable the girl I knew. I tried to rationalize the situation for a bit and wrote it off that she might have been chosen to present our class’s scholarship award.
When I sat down at the pews and took time read the programme that was handed to me at the door, I raged when I noticed a name among my cousin’s class. How the hell was I supposed to know that her brother was in my cousin’s class? He wasn’t in our school until after I had graduated. I had the sudden need to go use the bathroom so I got up and as I was making my way there, I spotted the girl walking towards my general direction among a small group of adults. I had no desire what so ever to talk to her or even acknowledge that she was there. So what I did was kept my eyes focused else where and used the group of adults as a wall which worked as I expected.
When I got back to my seat, saw even more of my former classmates as well as the crazy awesome Green Berret who was my boss when I used to do volunteer work at the church as well as the swim coach when I was crazy enough to be the team manager. I was gripped with a strong feeling of nostalgia and felt like I was back in my senior year of high school, the most emotionally painful year of all. I managed to survive the commencement ceremony by pushing my feelings of nostalgia to the back on my mind and focusing on other thing.
After the ceremony, everyone gather at the front steps of the church to congratulate the graduates as well as take pictures with family and friends. It was there that I kept getting close calls with her and on one occasion nearly making eye contact, my only saving grace is that I’m quick, short, and can easily disappear in crowds. I know all of my efforts to not even acknowldge her comes off really pathetic but I really did not want to open up that little black box in the back of my mind that has all the things I experienced with her. I did not and still do not want to fall in love with her again.
Hoping to get today’s events out of my mind, I drank a lot of cheap piss water beer (aka corona and 13 of them to be exact) expecting to be drunk and blurr away everything. Unfortunately I got nothing more than a buzz and can still remember crap. I guess I should have gone for the bottles of wine instead.