It's hard to imagine 18 years of my life is scattered across the pages of all those notebooks.
I picked up the one on the top right and started to flip through it. Big mistake. 1997. Junior year. The year that blurred the lines between being invisible on purpose and being invisible because I wasn't one of the beautiful popular girls.
I flipped through pages of summer love, summer anger, summer makeups, summer romantic bullshit, back to school crushes, and countless poems for boys with whom I had longstanding one-sided love affairs with despite them never knowing my name.
To this day, some of the boys in that book have no idea who I am. Some of them probably couldn't pick me out of a crowd of one. Some I barely remember. And some I can't seem to ever forget.
I found an entire section of poetry dedicated to a boy on my brother's hockey team who used to flirt relentlessly with me and blow kisses to me whenever he scored a goal. After one game, he managed to get my shoe and throw it in a tree. In attempt to get my shoe back, we wound up in a wrestling match that ended with him on top of me in a tackle. After a week of butterflies, I worked up the nerve to give him one of the poems I had written for him. I put it on the fanciest stationary I owned and gave it to him at school when no one else was around.
flipping through my poetry book, I came across that poem. At the bottom of the page in smudged ink, it lists the day I wrote it, the day I gave it to him and a note that said "He never spoke to me again."
To this day, I have a slight hatred of the Pittsburgh Penguins just to spite him from an illogical, nonsensical latent teenage attempt at revenge.
I couldn't care less if he never meant any of the smiles or kisses or kind words. I have long since gotten over the fact that he would more than likely have dumped me the moment my morals got in the way of a good time.
But what I can't forget, what ALWAYS comes up first on the rare occasions he crosses my mind is the way he pointed and laughed at me in front of his friends the day after I gave him the poem. The way he made fun of me as I walked by and his friends snickered because he'd likely shown them the poem and in attempt to save face for himself, I became the shoe in the tree. But when he tackled me the last time, there was no smile, no blowing kisses, no jokes about how he was a tougher hockey player than me. Just a cruel boy who had no idea he was burning his permanent footsteps in my life.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to him. Sometimes I run into mean people on the street and I want to look him up on the Internet and tell him "some jerk reminded me of you" but I know it wouldn't matter. And it's okay. Because not all boys are like him.
In at least a third of that stack of books is almost a decade worth of poetry scattered here and there for a boy who probably wouldn't have gone out with me if he was on fire and I was the only person on earth with a bucket of water. I didn't find out until graduation that he knew I always had a crush on him but I always knew he was never interested in me. More than that, though, I always knew that he was the only guy up to that point in my life who has *always* been honest with me, always treated me with respect and didn't care if I wrote stupid cheesy "never gonna happen" poems about him behind his back.
I'm sure most of that stack of books would probably better serve humanity as a small bonfire but you know, it's nice to look back and see that in a stack of 200 single-spaced hand-written pages of mean boys in the world, there was always one who kept giving me hope that someday I'd meet someone different. In retrospect, I'm glad he never liked me as more than a friend. I know he poked fun behind my back (and to my face) about my crush but he also showed me how to fall in love with the the thought of not getting what you wanted in life.
I still can't find the poetry book I set out to write in tonight. But there I go not getting what I want again. Sometimes life is beautiful.
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