Everybody Knew but Me

Do you ever have those nights where you lay in bed and you think about one time in your life? Just one. You think about what it means, and what you can or did learn from it? Maybe you didn’t learn anything from it; it just feels like you should have?

I was lying in the room I spent a good deal of growing up in the other night, and I don’t know where it came from, but I had a flashback to a night when I was sixteen. I was in my parent’s basement with a girl I knew from work named Annie. I had never had a girlfriend up to this point and I was really hoping that was going to happen with Annie.

You know Charlie in High Fidelity? Annie was kind of like my Charlie: the kind of girl I thought I wanted to meet (which, honestly, meant to a sixteen year old me that she was hot), and “she liked me, she liked me, she liked me…at least I think she did,” and in hindsight I can see that she was awful. If I had never heard that she thought I was cute, I would have never attempted to humiliate myself, by trying to go out with her, but, as it goes, she did think I was cute, and I did hear about it.

We started hanging out. We spent most of our time with her friends who were like her and were mostly rich preppies, dumb jocks, and cheerleaders. They listened to Limp Bizkit, and Kottenmouth Kings, and drove $60,000 cars their parents bought for them. I had nothing in common with them, and I hated hanging out with them. Eventually, I got her and a couple of her friends to come hang out with my friends. That didn’t quite work, either. Just about everyone in my life could see the kind people they were except me. The one time we hung out with my friends it ended with Annie’s friend, Jessica, crying, and her other friend yelling insults at everyone, and an awkward twenty minutes of me driving them home early.

Despite everyone asking me why I was hanging out with her, I plugged on hoping it would all be okay soon. I never did kiss her, though. I wussed out every night I hung out with her, which was probably my subconscious holding me back more than it was being a wimp. On the last night we hung out I walked her to her car and we just stood there having that awkward moment before a first kiss. I chickened out again and she got in her car. I finally got the balls and asked her to get out of her car for a second, which she wouldn’t do. She said we could do it later. Embarrassed, I said, “Okay, well, I am going to go inside and hang myself now.”

She told all her friends about me trying to get her out of the car, which led to me getting made fun of all day at work. I was too embarrassed to keep trying.

Anyway, the night I was thinking about was when the two of us were laying down in my room. Something was in the air, something heavy, and it could have been romance for all I knew, but I started spouting out some feelings. They had to do with fear mostly, I mean I was sixteen, seventeen, and soon high school would be over and I was getting on in years. I was afraid of the future and that was what I was telling her, and she had no idea what I was talking about. She didn’t understand how someone could be afraid. I didn’t know how to explain fear to her, and I felt a little silly, but mostly I felt confused. How could someone that age not feel at least a little fear? I began to realize that she was not really in touch with reality. Maybe she was too sheltered, or was ignoring it, but I felt kind of sorry for her. At least I knew what fear felt like. At least I knew it was something to be felt, and was real. And I know now that that particular fear has been conquered, and I know how much I have learned while doing it. I know now that since I have moved on to much bigger and scarier fears in my life, that it is necessary, and that I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I wasn’t afraid of certain things. I know that if you are unable to feel fear then you probably aren’t able to feel a lot of the other things life is.

And life is a lot of things.

She got married about three years later. Her husband was an ex-boyfriend of hers at the time I was attempting to date her. I met him a couple of times and they are a match. I wonder how you can get married without a concept of what it is like to be afraid? Of course, now that I write that it seems like a lack of fear would make it pretty easy, and maybe that is better. But maybe it is like the back-up quarter-back syndrome where the first-string guy goes down and the back-up QB does an incredible job for the first few weeks because he doesn’t know how hard it is supposed to be…but it does eventually catch up to him.

I guess what I can get out of that night is that I am glad I am a person who feels. I am glad I have had ups and downs and know that I always will, that at times I will be afraid, but, at others, so happy I could pee. I am glad I don’t blissfully float through a naive life waiting for the human experience to catch up to me.