AN INTEREST
There was a boy that I grew up with in a small, little-known neighborhood of the city. He was a skinny kid, just like me, with dark but grayish hair (somehow) and big round glasses. When we first met in the second grade, for whatever reason, he had peaked my interest, and I must have done the same to him as well. I did not acknowledge it as so at the time, but I must’ve gotten some inkling about this interest of mine by the beginning of junior high, when I started to feel self-conscious about the times we spent together.
At an age when children would begin to use labels such as boyfriend and girlfriend, I tried being subtle about the amount of time we spent together. I told him that if anyone asked, just say we were siblings. We looked similar enough for that lie to pass, if people ignored the fact that our last names were different. Then, I started to reduce our interactions, spending our time together in silence.
I don’t know why I went to the extent I did to hide my interest. Perhaps I was shy about it, being a girl so young with a boyfriend already. Maybe I was also feeling pressured to play hard-to-get, as I was opening up myself a little too easily. As we got older, however, life made it easier to distract ourselves from each other, spending more and more time on our studies and less time together.
For the most part, my efforts worked. Kids stopped asking if he was my boyfriend or not. Eventually, my friends stopped mentioning him in our conversations. But as an effect of that distancing, he eventually stopped talking to me as well. He accelerated into his studies, acing all of his tests and earning the top of his class. All the while, I struggled to keep up with my peers. Math was becoming harder for me to comprehend, and the sciences were difficult as well. Before I knew it, we hardly saw each other anymore, as he was in all of the upper classes while I was in the compulsory ones. The most we interacted was a brief wave in the hallways.
As high school rolled around, I began to regret distancing myself, thinking I had lost him. I decided to try and forget so that I could focus on improving my studies, but he stayed in the back of my mind. His name was also thrown around a lot, making it harder for me to forget.
However, we ultimately ended up meeting each other once again. I don’t quite remember how or why, but one day, a quiet wave in the hallway turned into something more as we walked down the halls in the same direction. I remember he must’ve remarked on how we don’t get the chance to talk to each other anymore, and that was when I proposed we should exchange a journal between ourselves, each of us holding it for a week. It was through this writing that I found out, he still had an interest in me.
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