Reflections on One That Got Away

So, last night i was hanging out with my good friends Brandon and Tyson. After eating at the Vietnamese noodle house, we returned to T’s pad for some quality conversation. We talked about nothing in particular for a few hours, but by the end of the night, we were looking through old high school yearbooks from a time long ago. As we perused the pages of yore, searching for old crushes and other cute girls, something occurred to me: we are losers. Beyond that, while it is fun to reminisce and think about the past, it is the past for a reason. If it didn’t kill us then, it only helped turn us into what we are today. Without it, we would be different people, with different paths taken in life. While there are all things that we wish we could change, would the change make us happy today? My guess would be no.

If one subscribes to the notion that changes made in the past affect the future, then changing circumstances of yesteryear would affect your current life. So maybe if you had told that cute girl in English how you really felt about her, you could have dated, kissed, had sex or whatever, but how would it have changed your current life? Would it have been worth it? We don’t know the answers to these questions and there is no way to find out. One pretty insignificant choice, decision, or action twelve years ago could have altered your present, maybe for the good, but it could also do it for the bad. That is not a50/50 chance I am willing to take.

That being said, however, it still is fun, if not pathetic, to look back on things that were and things that weren’t. A short period during my senior year of high school sticks out in my mind. I, like most 17 year-old boys of my ilk, had a crush, and, as it is with most crushes of the sort, it was a crush on girl who was, for all intents and purposes, WAY out of my league: she was Mormon, I was not. She was attractive, I was not, at least not in that way. We will call her J.F. Anyway, as it was with my crushes, I did not know how to act around her. I could talk to her no problem, but I think I just threw a vibe of “I like you” and she could tell. Instead of being upfront and letting her know how I felt, I had to be the creepy boy and she had to be the one to tell me she wasn’t interested, coming back from a field trip no less. I am not saying that had I said something the situation would have ended differently, but this was probably the last time of about five or six times that this happened while I was in high school. if I would have been a more assertive person then, especially in regards to the ladies, my fragile teenage psyche wouldn’t have been trounced over and over again and maybe things could have been a bit more fun.

I think that these type of situations did have an affect on the person I became after high school. I found something later that I thought was the right thing, but maybe that feeling was based on the lack of having had something in high school. With some sort of experience in relationships before, even if just a simple high school thing, maybe I could have realized that it really wasn’t what I was trying to make it, and could have saved some time, grief, and money. Not that I have regrets, but you still have to wonder. I guess what I am trying to say is that this was a lesson 15 or so years in the making, but I wish it was something I had learned in the first five. But as I said in the beginning of this nonsense, we cannot live in the past. We need to work to make our present better so that our future is the best it can be. If we can do that, we should be able to get through this thing called life relatively unscathed. That is my new goal for my life, with the occasional reflection on the past for learning sake, but also because it is so fun sometimes!

P.S. If you know of the girl I speak of, let her know that it would be nice to see her again. If I were a betting man, however, I would bet she is probably married. If that is the case, c’est la vie!