Touched and Untouched

Today I was thinking about all the stuff I went through in high school. That crush I had on that guy when I was a freshman, and all the subsequent crushes followed closely by the trouncing I took at the whim of high school boys. When I was a freshman in college, I got close to a boy named Mike. We made out a few times, and I really liked him. Then one day he said (matter-of-factly) that he had a girlfriend and he was in love with her. Naturally, I was crushed by my crush, and bawled my eyes out for an entire evening.

And now here I am, over ten years later, still trying to get over someone crushing me like a little ugly bug. My guts oozing from the sides of his shoe. I wonder if I'll look back on this in another ten years and think of it as puppy love, as something that was silly and shallow and completely unworthy of all this pain. Or maybe those were just training for this, the real thing that would stop me in my tracks and make me wonder why I ever bothered. Back then I had the virginal belief that a man would like me and I would like him and that would be all there was, but now the less virginal me knows that I can't get a man to like me no matter how much I care for him. So things are pretty much the same as they were back then.

And I wonder, if I had known then that I would get to this point and be no further along than I was in the very beginning, when I was untouched, in body and heart. I wonder if I would have tried anyway. I wonder if I would've just put myself out of my misery before the misery came to plague me for an indeterminate length of time. Because this is the length so far: 1 year, 10 months, and 3 days. It's been that long since my heart was last in one piece, untouched by the careless whims of a high school boy masquerading in a teacher's skin.