I can't believe it.. but this must have been going on for least a quarter of a year of my 10th grade: the period of time where a hot friend on my schoolbus would giggle and cheekily run her fingers down my thigh, to the excitement of her watching friends (who seemed obsessed with gossiping about me, flirting with me, etc) After I didn't respond (I literally just did nothing when she did that) she eventually stopped the weird half joke/half serious flirting thing, but soon afterwards we'd actually sit together on the bus every afternoon and chat, and she'd wave at me every single time she exited on her bus stop, while I watched and waved slowly back. And I heard her say, to her friend, that she found me cute.
Then eventually, due to a change in bus routes, I was moved to a different bus. She was a year younger than me . We never really sought each other out during lunch/recess - we somehow never got close enough to justify it.
In my 12th grade, during study periods, we'd see each other in the library. Every single time I looked at her she was already looking at me. I'd "catch" her looking away from me the instant I looked. No, I hadn't been dull to her advances all this time, and I'd actually had a thing for her since she started flirting with me in 10th grade.
I think I didn't make a move during year 10 because I couldn't picture myself as attractive, desirable, interesting, etc. I was literally unable to comprehend how she felt (even though I somehow knew on a base level that she felt that way) and I think because I didn't comprehend it, I couldn't react to it. Hence the weird silence.
I'd had a rough year 8 - confidence-wise - that had really put me on a down turn. I'd had bad acne and this shitty can of deodorant that somehow made me stink, that for some reason I never replaced, and a girl I had to sit next to who didn't like me and made me worry about my smell and why my hair was falling out all the time, and how the cleaner kept taking my fallen hair off the carpet (which built up as I brushed individual hairs from the table throughout the day) and kept putting them back on my desk in a pile.
Anyway, 2 relationships later, I bump into the hot girl on a train. And she's no longer the sizzling, fun, flirtatious girl I knew. She dresses like a middle-aged person and talks sort of like one. I don't know how to describe the difference. There was no cheek. No immaturity. I felt immediately younger and stupider than her. I found it quite beautiful, actually, because it was the first time I meaningfully experienced what they call "growing up," through people I'd sort of grown up with. It's such a bittersweet loss that I never made a move.
