“First year me is totally doing a happy dance right now,” I murmured to him between kisses. Yes, I, the girl of extremely awkward ilk is on my sofa kissing my dream crush from my first year of university.

I would like to think that my social ineptness around males is like a cold, hard safety blanket, protecting me from experiencing the potent pangs of rejection. However, I never expected for my man anxiety to get in the way of a good thing.

I met him the first week of school. We sat about five people away from each other in our frosh circle. I was the too cool for school Torontonian, and he was just my type (skinny, bespectacled, pale and plaid shirted). Underneath my Ray-bans I rolled my eyes at the then-irritating get to know you games and activities. After about five minutes, I mumbled something about having to help my mother set up my room, when in actuality, I dedicated the next five hours to improperly feng-shuing it.

Avoiding the contagious throng of frosh week hormones (and most likely a couple STDs), I sat in my room like any good, angry female liberal arts student would do and read Plath. It didn’t matter that I was turning into a trope, as long as I never had to do the walk of shame, or overanalyze that crush who “just wasn’t that into me.”

Inevitably, these things came later, but with such alarming infrequency that when they did happen, I was heartbroken.

Due to my inability to flirt shamelessly (someone please teach me), the boy and I became fairly good friends, bonding over a love of post punk, 90’s cartoons and raw cookie dough. My crush on frosh circle boy intermittently soldiered on. I wrote R-rated journal entries, yammered loudly in his general direction about my love of cats, and generally did all the things that could quite ostensibly be called “man repellant.”

After I stopped seeing him around, I dated other people and figured that it was just another one of my unrequited loves. Until he moved to Toronto. 

I figured that maybe we could hang out again, kind of like we used to–and I could awkwardly quasi pine, while he laughed at my shitty jokes. After two gin and tonics, I caught him glancing at me. I smiled and looked downward. He had a crooked, half moon smile that I’d never really caught him using with me before.

Somehow, he ended up on the tan leather sofa with me. Somehow, our hands interlocked, and my head was resting on his shoulder. I peered hopefully up at him from underneath my specs. He leaned in, and our glasses collided into each other. Mirror image like, we threw them to the floor at the same time, and began to kiss frantically.

“First year me is TOOOTALLLLY doing a happy dance right now, I had the biggest crush on you,” I murmured between kisses,

“Woah, really?” he half-whispered incredulously.

“Yeah.”

“I thought I was just your friend,” he said, “I really liked you all throughout first year.”

“ME?”

Now I was the incredulous one.

~ Natasha Hunt