When I got home later that night I felt an overwhelming urge to burst in to tears. And I did. Crying was a feeling that I both loved and loathed. With it came such an intense feeling of relief, but gone with it was my sense of sanity. I felt the hot tears streaking their way down my cheeks and my nose began to block up.

I didn’t exactly know why I had been so overcome by my own emotions. I’d had a really nice night with Michael. He had made me feel extremely comfortable and it didn’t seem as though he expected anything from me, just my company. He had this amazing ability to make me feel okay to be myself. Admittedly, I was still really shy with him. I didn’t really say much, and as usual he did most of the talking. I was bad at making conversation and I found it hard not to answer him without giving closed answers. I tried to open up, because I really wanted to—I wanted to let him get to know me a bit… but I was too socially inept.

I knew deep down that part of my upset was to do with the fact that I had such conflicting feelings within my heart. Part of me was angry for letting down my guard, even if it was just an inch. I didn’t want to be hurt again; I didn’t want anyone to see that part of my heart. I almost wanted it to remain untouched as it was, a wounded heart, unhealed. I didn’t want anyone to ever make me feel any type of warmth toward them.

I wanted to be so nasty to Michael; I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought of him. I wanted to call him a freak and tell him that his hair was the greasiest that I’d ever seen and that his friendship with famous midgets wasn’t cute at all. I wanted to tell him to never look at me in that way with his damned fucking beautiful, wide eyes. I wanted to tell him how Homo it was for a guy to be wearing makeup.

I couldn’t though. He was being far too nice and friendly for me to be able to willingly and intentionally hurt. So instead, I just found myself being far nicer than I had been with anyone in years. I hated him so much for that. I wanted him to do something, anything really that would make me be able to justify being a bitch to him—but all night I had just warmed up to him more and more.

I just felt at such a loss with my life. I had nothing to offer him. I had a dead-end job, nothing interesting to talk about. I had the social skills of a stump. I felt butt fucking ugly all of the time and my self-esteem was basically non-existent. I just didn’t know what the hell was keeping him interested in bugging the shit out of me.

Hell, I don’t know? Maybe to him I was like a challenge. I knew that guys done that kind of thing quite often- the chase was more exciting than the catch, right? Maybe he thought I held some kind of deep mystery. Well no, there was nothing deep about me. I didn’t have anything to reveal. I wasn’t some kind of emotional contortionist that sprung out with an amazing personality once I let someone get to know me.

I gave a sigh and wiped the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hands. I let out another pathetic sob, and cried until I was breathless for the next few minutes until I was sure my face was beet-red, and my nose was snotty.

I tried not to give a lot of thought to Aaron. Every time I met someone who I felt even a flicker of interest in, whether it was a guy walking past on the street that was kinda cute, or someone like Michael who I found I felt a spark with, my memories of that ass-backwards relationship came flooding back.

Aaron was someone I had grown up with. We met on our first day of junior high. He used to tease me so much, and at first I used to hurl abuse his way, but then I stopped retaliating to him altogether. We were in the same Spanish class for the first half of the year—but then something seemed to change. He started being nice, and would visit my desk. He used to tell me about his favorite actors or singers – they were always the same as mine. He later confessed that he’d peek at who the latest heart-throb was, plastered on to the front of my books, or which celebrity boyfriend I had professed my love for by vandalizing the school equipment with their name in hearts.

We kicked off an amazing friendship and I suppose we had an unspoken boyfriend / girlfriend relationship. We never kissed or held hands, but we hugged and sometimes I’d lie awkwardly in his arms while we watched movies at his house. I cringed to think back at what a dick head I was. We both had feelings for each other, but both of us were too shy to voice them. Aaron used to do the cutest things for me; I had been obsessed with Disney at the time, Pluto especially.

I rolled my eyes and shook my head at the thought of my strange phases.

Aaron used to draw me little Disney cartoons, albeit, badly – but nevertheless, the thought was there. We used to write each other letters even though we saw each other daily. One time just after we began high school together, my friends began to tell me how much he liked me, that their boyfriends—Aaron’s friends had told them so. Inevitably it created an awkward situation during lunchtime and we were forced to kiss.

I had been so shy and so nervous and so utterly scared of kissing him. He convinced me that it would shut them up and they would leave us alone, but I knew it was just because he thought it might be his only chance. The kiss was terrible. It was awkward and clumsy and I’d made the stupid mistake of opening my eyes during. He looked like a fish.

But it was the start of our relationship. It lasted almost four years. It was perfect for the most part- I could never have asked for a better boyfriend. We had the kind of relationship where we just knew that we’d never break up. I suppose if he stayed the person he was, we probably would have been together forever like we’d always proclaim. We even picked the names of our children and agreed on what suburb we’d move to after we got married.

I remembered the endless tears that I’d cried over him, sometimes still cried over him. They say you never really recover from your first love, and that was for damn sure.

It wasn’t just things that had happened with Aaron that had made me lock away my heart either. I knew I had intimacy problems, I knew exactly why but I wasn’t really completely interested in addressing them.

Even growing up I didn’t really have a lot of friends, and the people that I associated with all through school were about as lame and as annoying as the adults that I met to that day. One thing was for certain though, I surely wasn’t as bitter as I was as a teenager, though. I still had that naïve and trusting nature about me, even after what I’d been through. I’d always been a bit of a loner. I was the kid who could read and write in kindy, the one who saw math as a pleasure rather than a pain in the ass. Consequently, I was labeled as weird. It didn’t help that I hated school. I felt like it wasn’t challenge enough for me. I had to laugh, even from an early age I’d been looking down my nose at others.

I used to win all the awards at school. I remember the pride that filled the faces of my parents the day that I won an award for loaning more than 100 library books from the school’s library in less than a year. Despite the skepticism of my classmates, I had read every single book that I loaned. My parents were so proud – and even prouder at the end of my 6th grade assembly when I cleaned up in the academic excellence awards category.

Shit, I was a bright spark, there was no use pretending, but there was always a downside. I let kids push me around all through school. The friends I made would be nice for a few weeks and suddenly they’d exclude me from their groups during playtime.

I vividly recalled being alone in my room after school one day shortly after my parents had separated; I was only ten. I was on the end of my bed, cleaning out my school bag for the day. I had taken out my plastic lunch box and it reminded me of what had happened during the day. I had moved from group to group of children, asking if I could play and each time they had said no. I burst in to tears at the thought and my beloved Mommy had entered the room upon hearing my sobs. I remembered questioning her over and over why the other kids didn’t like me, but she was stumped.

I felt myself tearing up at the not-so-fond memories. My poor Mom; I couldn’t imagine how frustrating and heartbreaking it would have been to be helpless to your very own child’s loneliness. My Mom and Dad were wonderful though; my Mom played dolls with me when I didn’t have any friends to invite over on weekends. We baked brownies and played dress ups and everything, I liked it better that way, anyway.

Things got a little better in Junior High because I’d learned to be a little bit more modest about my intelligence and feigned idiocy whenever teachers asked me questions. I slunk to the back of classrooms and tried to fly under the radar. It seemed to work swimmingly. I made friends but it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. That’s when I began learning how incredibly stupid the human race was.

Shit, I couldn’t believe some people were even given permission to breathe the same air as I did. Of course, usually I kept that little ditty quiet.

I was totally ahead of myself. I was crying over Michael Jackson as though he’d asked me out or was even actually interested in me. It was almost like I wanted to feel like ass. Reflecting back on the past twenty three years of an existence in vain didn’t really seem to be helping either – in fact, it was just making my tears taste all the more salty.

At that moment, nothing was for certain except that I needed to take my self-pitying, worthless bitch ass to bed and sleep that shit off. Everything always felt better in the morning – and if it didn’t? Well, it wouldn’t have been the first time.