young love

Weird random memory time.

Because where I lived was almost completely rural until I was much older (it was two miles in every direction from so much as a bus stop and we didn't get pavements until I was in high school), the same group of students mostly went to the same schools. Every time we went up a level, from elementary to middle to high school, we added more kids but unless you went to a private school or moved or something, you basically had mostly the same peers for years at a time. So even if you didn't know them very well, you could still recognize them mostly by certain traits. Except for me, because there are people I went to school with for ten years who have no fucking idea who I am, partially due, I'm sure, to a radical change in my appearance over the years. One day I will post photos and prove this claim.

Anyway.

For years I had two classmates. Let's call them Marco and Carla. I knew who these kids were--Carla would later go on in high school as having a reputation to consent to advances even with the pickup line 'Nice shoes, wanna fuck?'--and they were known throughout the grade level in elementary school for one particular trait.

Everybody--and I mean EVERYBODY, including the janitors--knew that Marco had a huge crush on Carla. I mean he had this crush for years and chased her helplessly that whole time. Looking back on it even now it seems like an extremely powerful devotion to have even as an adult, let alone as an eight-year-old. We used to get kicks out of encouraging him to exhibit what I recognize today as behaviours constituting sexual harassment and stalking but back then it was just fun to watch. I feel kind of badly about it now, because since then I have been on the receiving end, like Carla, of unwanted obsessive affection that ranged from annoying to just plain scary. One guy named Al I went to middle and high school with notoriously had a massive crush on me for almost our entire school career and on a school trip to New York when we were thirteen, he stalked me for three days and paid the friends with whom I was rooming in our hotel to take pictures of me sleeping for him.

But yeah, Carla rebuffed Marco's advances for ages. Part of me feels quite badly for him because it SUCKS to want something you can't have--but at the same time I feel badly for her, as well, because you always come out as the bad guy when you're turning someone down even when their behaviour is totally unacceptable.