When my alarm went off this morning, I lay there for a snooze and wondered if you’d be at work today. If you weren’t going to be, I could snooze once more then throw on my uniform and grab coffee before running out. If you were, I would need to get up… I would need to fix my hair, do my makeup, make sure I wore the shoes that clicked as I came down the hallway, likely with Starbucks in hand. Maybe this would be the day you’d notice and ask me out. Maybe this would be the day that I would say the cute flirty thing and not the weird one. I decide you probably won’t be there but compromise and do minimal makeup and curl my bangs. I get to work, and you aren’t there, I go about my day and wonder if you’d been there would you have liked my new lipstick? Of course you would! You would ask me if I had plans since I had done my makeup and when I said, “no” would say “well, we should go do something after work.” I would play it cool and say “sure” hiding the exclamation mark that is definitely implied. Well surprise, I round the corner an hour before my shift is over and there you are. Crap. I hope my face didn’t look as panicked as it felt. You said hi, was that all you said? I didn’t pay attention, I was far too focused on my own heart pounding in my ears. I went to make myself look busy… but stayed close, in case you had something to say. In my head, you’d been listening to me talk to your friend. You interrupt my conversations and ask me questions you don’t need answers to just to talk to me. In reality you say “have a great day” as I walk by your office on my way out and the drive home begins the real job of convincing myself that you only didn’t ask me out because our shifts didn’t line up and that you didn’t flirt with me because there were others in the office. Success! Of course, I’ve always had a great imagination… I just didn’t realize I would use it so much to convince myself about guys.
So why won’t you act the way I imagined you would? What the heck is wrong with you? Am I imagining that you like me at all? Why is it that we imagine guys being so forward? We imagine them commanding and unquestionably bold. Why do we expect these guys to put themselves out there for us to just reject their advances and call them creepy. Poor guys, truly! We envision them walking across the crowded room after one flirty look. And maybe they would, but we aren’t even offering the flirty look. This is my apology and vow to try to not avoid eye contact and stare at my feet. 31 and no better with guys than when I was 13…
And at the risk of sounding like a Pen Badgely character, I have thought about you a lot… as generic as “you” can be. But this is how it goes, for all our lives with each crush we ever have. We imagine what you are thinking about us, we imagine what you’ll say to us, and most of all we imagine how it’s going to sweep us off our feet and leave the world with one less lonely girl.
And to top it allllll off, “you” moved states away and I found out online so it really was ALL in my head, heaven help me.
The Wordy Over Thinker 