Moving On

Sturken has a date today, and I am totally and completely chill.

Well, mostly chill. Not so chill that I'm not going to write about him here.

Basically, I had a crush on him from whenever I first started liking boys up until last month- which isn't to say that I wasn't into other boys. But, always, in the back of my mind, there was always a little thought of Sturken, and little pondering that "if I love him so much, is it really fair for me to pretend to love someone else?"

Yes, I said love. I can verify it with a lot of entries in my diary from the Fall of 9th grade in which I wrote just that. He's a family friend, a nice jewish boy who I've known since infancy. In middle school, back when he was shorter than me, he was nerdy, but he moved to Europe after 8th grade, and he seems to have turned into a bit of a jock. Well, he is addicted to those football video games on the X-box, and last time we visited him, he spent the entire time betting me that he could do a slam-dunk jump (not that he could actually slam dunk) and touch high objects (I, of course, dutifully pretended that he couldn't).

All in all though, I was somewhat obsessed. I currently view him as my first love, even if it wasn't reciprocated. Seriously, though, I had it bad. Read this:

We shivered as we waited in line, chattering about school and the meaningless information that, if anyone else were explaining, I would discard immediately. Our sisters, my two and his one, stood a bit behind us, huddled together, giggling between high-pitched whispers. We continued our talk, moving on to our friends. He poked fun at the names of mine, over pronouncing every consonant, I laughed, allowing the sound to bubble out, now that the darkness prevented him from seeing my blush. I retaliated, teasing him for his association with a boy who had acquired a mullet over the summer. He laughed too, creases forming around his eyes. I carefully approached the question of when he would return home. We were only family friends, I wasn’t supposed to miss him, yet the question pushed at the edge of my consciousness even when I had gone months without seeing him. “Soon, I hope," he told me, and I wondered at his words. Was it because he wanted to see me? Or was he simply tired of this land of rain and foreign accents? I wished that he, and not his parents, who debated a move to Singapore, was right. I wanted to be able too see him, hear his voice turn deep and slow when he tried to seem manly, then speed up, changing to its ordinary tenor when he was distracted. I wanted to remember every detail of him, to learn more of him than I ever could in a few short days every year. I watched his face carefully, searching for any hidden meaning, but why would he have let one show? I kept my thoughts just as tucked away.

We reached the front, and received our crêpes, thin pancakes filled with melted chocolate, almost too hot, compared to the cold air. We settled around a small table, the little sisters sitting, and us two standing, watching over them, just as we always had. The sisters were talking about him. “His nose is crooked,” his sister said, “isn’t it crooked?” She looked at me. I gazed at his face, head tilted. “It’s,” I paused. Beautiful? Perfect? Attractive? While he’d love to hear those, they revealed more of my thoughts than I cared to share. It fit his face perfectly, slightly large, with the softened angles of a young teenager, but “it fits your face” sounds like an insult to the rest of him. The pause was dragging out, and it was sounding like I truly believed his nose crooked. I finally managed a strangled “fine,” a tiny, meaningless word, good or bad, a placeholder, like everything else I said to him. I took another bite of the warm chocolate and gazed at him, trusting the darkness to hide me. It didn’t make sense to risk telling him, not when we only had two days together, and any potential payoff would be marginal. Two days of platonic joking far outweighed two days of what I feared would be pain. I watched him as he smiled, fighting to remember each and every image so that when I was home, I could imagine that I still had him, the crêpes, and the night.

I wrote that last year, back when the obsession thing was in full swing. Last month, though, it abruptly disintegrated. I remember biking around during Christmas break, praying that my next push of the pedals would be enough to push all the need for him out, and, miraculously, it was. It's almost enough to make me believe in God.

Anyways, Sturken has a date, and my only thought was a hope that he has a nice time. No jealousy, no nothing.

I'm cured.