My first crush: puppy love She was enchantingly attractive, adorned with spell. It was free dress Wednesday, so she was decked out in an elegantly conservative blouse and slacks. Her dark middle-eastern features played like a cool guitar riff against the euphony of her lyrical face. I watched her fixedly as she strutted the lonely, well lit stage of my undivided attention. My mind had started drifting into a day dream about her when the teacher’s words intruded on my preoccupation, ‘And what do you think Philip…?’ I promptly turned around, looking at him blankly while silence washed over the class; the teacher looked back at me with a facial expression that read Well? Then when he saw how clueless I was, he admonishingly shook his head as his eyes narrowed with simmering irritation. At that moment, the period came to an end as I was saved by the bell. Phew! The teacher quickly unglued his eyes off of me and rested a softened gaze on the rest of the class as he reminded everyone to do the homework that I didn’t know a thing about. When we filed out of the class for break time, I started sniffing the trail of that mystery girl. But it had run cold and I failed to see her. She was lost in the shifting sands of my life. The next week, on a Monday, I found myself reading magazines in the school library. Then I heard a fluttery voice wafting from in between the shelves. Out of curiosity, I craned my neck to get a glimpse of who it was and Eureka! The mystery lady was there talking to a pal of mine. I couldn’t believe my luck. Should I go over to them, I asked myself. But before I could make a decision to make three company, the two of them had left together without my noticing. I quickly ditched the magazines and sped out of the library in pursuit of them. But they had vanished like Sho Kusugi in Revenge of the Ninja. At 1:00pm school came to an end. And students spilled onto the dusty detritus stretch just outside the south gate (when coming from my place, Masaki). I looked for my pal and found him just about to get into his mom’s car. Who was the mystery girl that I saw you with in the library earlier, I asked him. To clear to the fog of perplex in his mind, I described her to him. Then he smiled as he placed who I was talking about and then breezily asked whether I ‘loved’ the girl. Before I could shyly say no, he volunteered her name and number. Then he reassured me that she was friendly and I should give her a bell. At this point his mom told him to get his butt in the car or risk walking home. He thus dived into the vehicle and left me standing there, armed with the open-sesame information that could give me entrée into my dream girl’s life. Her name was Adiva(not real name), I learnt. For days I held onto this contact information but didn’t use it. I couldnt ask for my pals help because he had suspiciously developed a debilitating illness that kept him away from school for ages. I was on my own. I kept wondering how I would introduce myself, what would I say and would she just slam the phone on me once she realized that I was a complete stranger to her… the questions piled up into a Himalaya of doubt. Up until that point, I was a painfully shy kid with my tail tucked firmly between my legs when it came to meeting girls. And I was as much a virgin as I was the day I was born. Now I had to meet this girl I didn’t know but had a major crush on. Really, I had as much chance of dating this girl as a snowflake would have surviving in the hottest part of hell. Shit! I screamed while at home, chair-bound in the living room, listening over and over to the George Michael and Deon Estus’ hit song Heaven Help Me. Self-doubt plagued my thoughts: what if she would give me a finger wagging warning just for saying hello, the kind my chick-reject pal Steven got routinely from the girls. Even though I was largely immobilized by fear, I decided to pick up the phone and call one afternoon after school... ‘Hello’, went a honeyed, breathless voice from the other end of the line. That greeting instantly triggered a knee jerk response in me and I quickly placed the phone back on its cradle. Damn, you coward I said to myself. After counting to three, inhaling and exhaling, I dialed up her number again. ‘Hello…?’ she greeted and queried at once. A lingering quiet followed as she waited for a response and I waited for the ground to swallow me up. I slammed down the phone again as beads of sweat collected on my furrowed brow. Then I went out into the garden and practiced what as I going to say to her with Lucy, our dog, playing the role of Adiva. Lucy sat tilting her head in confusion as she heard my ‘I would like to get know you’ monologue. She then abruptly got up and barked at me before trotting to a part of the garden well away from Dr Doolittle. I was now bent out of shape big time. After about two hours of searching and premature she loves me, she loves me nots, I steeled myself and marched fast back inside, determined to say my piece and be damned. But on my way there I tripped over the damn rug in the dinning room and landed face flat on the floor. Ouch! My lip was bleeding. Fear was now displaced by anger as smoke issued from my ears and pursed lips like I was a human choo-choo train. I dialed anew…. This time when her voice floated through the phone, I introduced myself pell-mell.... with my words falling over themselves. I think I even accidentally called her variously ‘Philip’ and ‘bro’! But she was very warm and easy going. Her silken voice sounded like a voice in the wilderness as the rest of the world disappeared around me. She told me that she was not going to be in school until next week because of family commitments, when I asked if I could meet her. As my spirits went south, she said she could, however, meet me after school the following day at around 4:00pm. We agreed that we could meet just outside the northern entrance gate and then take it from there. When I put down the phone, everything seemed right with the world. And I was feeling brand new. My bro Mike, noticing my radiance, asked me what was what up. I then told him minutely what had just happened, embellishing the truth to make me look like a master seducer, no less. Mike listened and looked silently at me, a little envious. Then he asked when and where I would meet Adiva. I happily told him, then skipped out of the room with a trampoline in my step. The very next day, I left home at about 3:00pm. Since school was within striking distance from our pad and the sun shone mildly, I walked. The murram road that led to the school was broken here and there by shrubbery. But geography was the last thing on my mind as the biology of Adiva’s physicality kept a steady presence on my mind. At the approaches of a local supermarket, I felt as if I was being watched and instinctively spun on my heels to determine if I was. At that point, I saw Mike at about 100 meters from me. He had been tip toeing in my wake, following me. Stunned and caught flagrante, he stopped in his tracks. Not knowing what to do next, he flung himself into the nearest bush and within a second, was out of sight. I shook my head and wondered if he wondered if I hadn’t seen him. Then I continued on my journey only looking back occasionally to establish that I wasn’t being followed again and nope, no one was there. When I got to school, I waited and waited but Adiva didn’t show. So at about 5:00pm I went home, with a heavy heart. That evening I called her to ask what had kept her from coming; she apologized and pleaded home commitments. But we could meet in school next Monday, she added. Since she didn’t know me by face and I knew her, I should approach her and introduce myself, we agreed. Monday came but I kept seeing her with a gaggle of giggling girls and this scared me stiff. I waited to catch her alone but she seemed to be always in the society of friends. I would watch her like a cop on a stakeout and she would be none the wiser since she didn’t know what I looked like. That was until one day when I almost blew my cover. I was rushing from one class to another and so where several other students, then I saw her coming head on towards me. Well, not towards me but towards my direction. I was petrified, what do I do now I wondered. When she was about 2 meters from me, I quickly hid behind one of the columns on the pathway…. jumping clear out of her way and nearly out of my own skin! Then, I stood there as if hugging the column, for a moment. I soon realized that I was giving myself away and looking dumb hiding for all to see like that. So just as she had passed, I jumped back on the pathway… avoiding collision with her by hairsbreadth. I then nervously looked over my shoulder to see whether she had seen me. When I turned around, my eyes were held by her puzzled glare as she looked back at me, questioningly. I realized I was busted and before she could connect the dots, I stepped on the gas of my Shoe-mobiles and marched away, fast. I doubt she knew that it was me monkeying about like that that day. For all I know, she couldn’t place the confident voice on the phone with the shy column-hugging pansy that I was to her in person. We talked a few times after that day but my crush soon cleared like the morning mist.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 06:22:33 +0000
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