Somebody told me to write a love story. I can't believe the nerve. Do I seem like the kind of person who's been in love, let alone someone who would write about it? Trick question, asshole. Because I have and I will. Although the whole concept of writing about romance is appalling, especially in this hayday of Twilight and shitty teenage dramas. People who choose to romanticize romance depress me. Some people are so swept up with the idea of being in love that they probably never will be, and choosing to look back and dwell on a past relationship doesn't sit well with me. I'm not the most well-rounded person in a relationship anyway, and I'm definitely not the person to look to for a touching story or some point to be made about them. What the hell do I know? I just tell stories; I can't drive something like that home when I don't have much experience in it. And that's really all I have to say on that.
So there's this girl I met in High School. Because that's how all of these kinds of stories begin. You can already bear witness to the laughable cliches that are about to unfold, the unmanageable amount of teenage angst you're about to watch. Judging people for it is pretty silly, though. Whether we admit it or not, it happened a lot in High School to each and every one of us. I think most people are disgusted by it because they know it happened to them too, and when they look back on it they don't like what they see, and they don't like being reminded that each and every one of us was that fucking stupid and naive and unrealistic and inexperienced at that time. Eh, that happens. But right, the story.
I remember it... not exactly clearly. For the most part, everything that happens in this story is true save some exaggerations. It's true in my head at least, and that's all that matters. I spent most of those days in High School practicing escapism by forgetting, blocking or altering my memories, and a few times a week just drinking and drinking and drinking and taking loads of vicadin just to get through the day. Honestly I can't recall a damn thing from most of my High School years. So all be it from me to remember perfectly what happened.
She was short. About 4'9" or 4'10". Pale as the sun with equally pale blonde hair. Despite her height, fucking gorgeous. Somebody you would expect to be completely out of my league, or most people's leagues for that matter. But it's pretty easy to be out of my league. I was an ugly kid in High School. Yeah there's no beating around the bush there. I'm serious. There are literally no pictures of me from High School for this reason. I was the kid they used in the "Before" pictures in the Proactiv commercials, but not in a literal sense. I hate to go off on a tangent already, but chances are your self-image is crippled enough as it is by your skin problems, so how much money would they have to pay somebody to have their photo put on national television to go "HE USED TO BE UGLY, BUT NOW HE ISN'T"? I've yet to see the "After" picture, but I'm managing better now.
Also I was pale, sickly, dangerously underweight and without muscle mass. Of course that was from the lack of food in my house and I had to scavenge like my great Native American Ancestors did to feed myself. Compounding all of this, you'd think that if I was from the Middle Ages that the peasants would run screaming from me in fear because they'd suspect that I had the Black Death. I looked like an emaciated Jew who just dodged the furnace at Auschwitz. And people don't like that comparison for two reasons. For one, it's insensitive and distasteful and offensive and disturbing, but predominantly because it's fucking right and it's an ugly thing to think about. Not nearly as ugly as me, but it was close.
So how did I meet her? Well one thing I do remember was that I was in class and I got called up to the board to do something. I tripped and smacked my head on the board, yet got up and still continued to do the work. I was bleeding from my forehead apparently, so my teacher figured that going to the nurse's office would've been a great idea at that point. And I'm not sure how it happened, but I was running to the office, and despite being a 110-pound 5'2" freshman at that time, I was certainly bigger than she was. I think that might explain why I knocked her down so easily, but I was struck with cupid's arrow when I first saw her. Even on the ground clearly unconscious she was something. A bit homely; she didn't really know how to dress. She was always in hoodies, which was a shame since they really undermined how attractive she was.
So the nurse didn't really like the idea of seeing a kid stumble in with his forehead bleeding helping a jarred girl walk. She thought she didn't hear the bomb go off. I didn't, either. But that's a hell of an icebreaker isn't it? Injuring somebody when you first meet them? Hoo boy, hearing stories like that around the water cooler were pretty interesting. But right, she pulls out a GBASP while lying down and starts playing it. An opportunity. I don't exactly remember what she was playing, but that might've been due to the concussion I gave myself on the whiteboard. But all I remember is that she uttered two or three words and then it was dead. Awkward. Silence. 'Huh, well she's shy,' I thought. Of course I had no room to talk, either. I was extremely shy and awkward in High School myself. I had a face that not even a mother could love, but my mother didn't love me anyway because she was a self-centered bitch, so I might be misusing that metaphor.
But eventually we started seeing each other a bit more around the campus, mostly during lunch time. They were brief and awkward conversations initially, and being the lonely bastard I was, I tended to talk. A lot. A lot. A LOT. I would talk this poor girl's ear off for the entire lunch period. I was verbally molesting her. But... she never minded. Mainly because she didn't talk too much due to being so damn shy. But again I didn't care; as long as somebody was there to listen. Until videogames were brought up, then she might have more to say. She talked about things like the Dreamcast and PS2, foreign systems to me at this time because my family was poor and thus I stuck primarily to Nintendo consoles. But for once I decided to listen to somebody else.
And thus we became friends.
And this is pretty fucking long. I don't need to bombard you people with so much at once. I'll add the second part in a bit.
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