Naive

Lemme tell you a story about a young naive girl who once fell in love with a boy for the first time.

When I was in 6th grade, there was this boy who sat in front of me in class. Let's call him D. He was tall, smart, good at football and guitar too. I had to agree that D was a bit good looking, and looked strong despite of his overly slim figure. 

There were so many girls at school fancied him, including one of my bestie who happened to be my chairmate (let's call her R). R was madly in love with him. I could hear her telling me how D made her heart flutter all day and every day. Mind you, we were in 6th grade: we had after school classes until 3 p.m.

Even though D was every girl's heartthrob at that time, I didn't like him in the slightest because I thought he was rude, insensitive, and childish. D sometimes made insensitive remarks towards R that broke her heart a couple of times. How could he didn't realise that R liked him? It was so obvious in every way.

Since we sat closely, we often chatted and pranked each other (lol, we were just kids peeps). He once put a   paper that full of wet correction pen on my seat, and without realising it, I sat on that thing. My red skirt stained with a white spot thanks to him. He laughed and ran from me once I sensed his misconduct. I chased after him.

I often sticked a paper on his back just for fun since it was easy for me to do that on him. Gosh, it was so silly. How fun and simple a 6th grader life was.

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There was also this unfortunate girl in my class. This girl was bullied because she had a skin condition that full of ulceration mark on her legs and hands. She was depicted as "ugly" by some of my school mate. Some also jeered at her behind her back, saying that she was stinky while in fact she wasn't! No one really wanted to be friends with her except for one or two people. Me? Of course I conformed with the social "norm", but never really avoided her or spoke badly of her.

And she had a crush on D too. Again, it was so obvious, at least for me─I'm just so good at observing people you know. Yet, I didn't think D knew about that. 

While most of people completely avoided this girl, not with D. He once openly asked her whether he could borrow any stationary he needed if he couldn't find one around. Trust me, most of people would avoid to do that because they didn't want to be "associated" with the girl. That exact moment was actually the turning point of me starting to "observe" more about D.

D rarely was the one who initiated badmouthing about this girl. Unless when someone teased him with her, he could blurt out some mean comments about her. He never really complained if he had to be in one project group with the girl. In fact, he was pretty cool about that. And from his interaction with the girl, I started to notice more about D. Although he was really immature towards me, I could see that he actually had this gentleman-like nature in him. While I started noticing more details about him, I fell deeper into his charm.

He suddenly looked really cool when he played football, or guitar. When he laughed, I couldn't help but smiling. I got really happy when we both were selected as our class representatives in a "cerdas cermat" quiz (we won, peeps, I used to be smart too you know lol). Then I started to crave for his attention, got jealous when he talked with popular girls (lol, why it had to be popular tho), and hated it when R (my chairmate, if you forget) exaggerated his interaction with her. He did that to me too!

However, I didn't have the courage to tell R that I fell for the same guy as she did.

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There was this ritual R and I did every day in the morning: we checked on our compatibility with our crushes based on our full names and the current date. I didn't remember how and why the hell we did that, but I remember clearly that the output of that ritual was a compatibility score between us and our respective crush. For example, R and D on 11 August 2006 score was 88. Since we were so naive, we believed that something good would happen that day to our "relationship" with our crush.

So every morning, we would write down our full name and our crush's on the back of our own notebook and told each other the score. Of course, I didn't write down D's name: I wrote down a boy's name whom I had crush on before I eventually fell for D. Let's call him L.

It was almost the end of our elementary school days with only a couple of exams left before we graduated. R and I just got back from having lunch when we saw D opened my secret notebook. He looked at me and announced the name loudly in front of the class: "L"!

I got furious─well, actually pretended to be furious. To be honest I wasn't that angry since I didn't really like L; I liked you. He ran with my notebook and I chased. Once I got the book, I let out my anger on him, and I could see he was a bit taken aback seeing me unleashed my rage towards him.

And that was the last time we ever had a "conversation"─if we could call that a conversation.

After that incident, we got really awkward if we passed each other. Since I pretended to be angry at him, I didn't want to initiate any contact. The same goes with him, he didn't try to initiate any contact either.

Then we all graduated from elementary school, but I still met him for years because unfortunately we got into the same school. We never talked to each other ever since, pretended not knowing each other when we crossed path─thankfully we never got into the same class. 

It was hard on my part, you know, as I still liked him for years. I watched him grew up to be a gentleman as I predicted earlier, fell in love with a beautiful girl, surrounded by popular students as well. He had quite the reputation as an ideal guy to date by people in my school, and I could see why. He then got accepted into a very prestigious uni, majoring in the field he desired. So we both parted ways.

I actually had stopped having a crush on him on the first year of high school. As people say, "time will heal", but still, 4 years is not a short period of time. I turned out to be pretty loyal don't you think? If I fall, I fall really deep, and I might end up with burying myself as I have trouble to climb up the pit (idk if this makes sense or not lol).

So that's it peeps. I was just a young silly girl who fell in love I guess. This story suddenly popped up in my head after I scrolled down my Line acc and found my Elementary School group: I saw some familiar names in there and it brought back the memory.

I never heard anything from R since we graduated elementary school. She moved into a new town not so long after graduation and we just lost contact. Honestly, I did a quick "research" on her before writing this post, just to see how she was doing: I guess she was doing pretty well.