It started about halfway through the semester. She walked into my Honors Economics class, looking like a classy Audry Hepburn, nineties style, with dark jeans, I’m sure, and one of those "girl" style t-shirts. They’re hard to explain—short sleeves, eliptical neck-line. The truth is, I don’t remember what she was wearing. She had that all American girl smile and longer-than-chin-length hair swivveling atop her head. I immediately began dreaming of her personality, the type that would laugh at dumb jokes, roll her eyes at a teacher’s overwhelming homework assignments, uncontrolably make poor boys fall in love. But I wouldn’t ever find out. She sat across the room, constantly shuffling papers on her desk, with ample protection from my line of vision by desks and warm bodies. She wasn’t average—average being a regurgitated version of the "group" of friends who would engage in activies such as becoming giddy and teasing boys, stressing about her hair, pretending to be attractive on the inside while pretending to be unattractive in outlook, talking bad about the other girls who, known to everyone else, talked bad about them—she was different, out of my league and I knew it.
So I admired her from a distance, telling no one of my silly boyhood crush while dreaming of a world where we would walk around shopping centers poking fun at life, buying stupid things, having them break before the day ends, and poking fun at that. We would develop inside jokes between us that we would displace from our minds until long after the fact, and one of us would become suddenly reminded of the joke a great time later, and we would both laugh for hours, until our cheeks hurt from over-excitement and our stomaches forced us to keel over, possibly in a fast-food joint, as the workers and other patrons looked on in embarrased amusement. We would then be reminded, a great time later, of our laughter and start the cycle again. And that’s how it went in my dream world, forgetting that, in reality, the closest I had come was making her laugh with my in-class corny jokes and antics—the types of things that the teacher just rolls his eyes at because he would feel guilty for punishing the same actions that he rushes home to tell his wife about over dinner, as they laugh at the wistful idealism of youth.
But the reality of it all just depressed me too much. It was a bubble of a dream where you hate to see it just float away, but you know that if you try to grab it, it will surely pop, so you just sit around and admire the bubble before it leaves of it’s own accord. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was louder and more unabashed than everyone in the class, she wouldn’t even know, or care, who I was. She was the bubble of my life, the onery perfection that is barely unattainable. Until the new seating chart came about which placed my seat directly in front of hers.
Greetings ensued and, while she seemed nice, she seemed equally perturbed by my forthrightness. That could not have been a good sign to me—she already was sick of talking to me. Or was I second guessing myself; a task I do all too often? Either way, it didn’t pan out on earth as it did in the dream world. I changed my attitude with the new seating chart. Where I would normally be shouting jokes to the class, I opted to whisper them to her instead. This might have made her feel special and she just didn’t know how to express it, other than to laugh, or she felt terribly annoyed, but was too nice to do anything but laugh. Either way, this cycle ensued for days, weeks, even.
But she never fell for me like I thought she would. She never protruded into my life like she had in the dreamworld but, in a way, she had. My petty whispers and jokes developed into mild inside jokes and, althought we never became great friends, there was that hour in economics where, although she never knew, she had escaped with me into my dream world, where we laughed until our cheeks hurt, from the over-excitement on my part and the defense mechanism on hers, until the bell rang and we would not see each other until the next day.
"Goodbye" one of us might say as she exited my dream world. I hope this doesn’t end, I would think to myself. But it would. It will. And she’ll never even know it.