The Waiting Game

The Twelfth Letter

I’ve met you a thousand times.

When we were in kindergarten, I met you that day that we were having recess and we ran straight into each other. We bumped heads, not noticing the other as we ran, and I gave you a fat lip. I got an impressive bruise on my temple. We cried, but you definitely cried more than I did.

I gave you a Valentine in second grade. I could hardly remember the event in kindergarten but I think you still did. I still remember you looking down at the Scooby Doo Valentine before looking back up at me, looking so shocked. I just stood there and fidgeted nervously, waiting for you to say something.

You smiled at me, and it felt like I had been flying.

In middle school, I was always that weird kid. People were poking fun at me all of the time and I guess I kind of got convinced that the person they thought me as was the person I really was. So I kind of turned into someone weird, someone with outrageously weird ideas, strange plans to take over the world, the kid who wore a hat every single day no matter the outfit. It surprised me by feeling right. Like this was who I was always supposed to be.

We didn’t really talk much in middle school. I had hoped that you hadn’t forgotten about me.

I remember this time in eighth grade during lunch. We were both sitting at different tables in the lunchroom and someone yelled my name across the room, last name and all. And it was like . . . you woke up.

You looked up, and your head whipped around until you found me sitting alone at a table with a book the size of rural Montana. Our eyes locked for a long moment and it felt like gravity has ceased to exist. It felt like magic, but I knew that it was stupid to believe in things like that.

As we were looking at each other, I noticed that you were shocked. Like you hadn’t even noticed in three years that we went to the same school. That hurt. But I understood because middle school was such a weird time in everyone’s lives, and we all have to take the time to found ourselves.

Time and time again, all I ever found was you.

You smiled at me, like you were relieved. Like you hadn’t been able to find me under my transformation, and now you knew what to look for. That might have been the case, but I don’t know. I just remember smiling back and one of my friends crashing in the seat beside me and asking me who I was smiling at. I looked at him, shot him a look, but when I looked back at you, you were already back to talking with your friends. Your eyes didn’t turn to me again for the longest time.

I was always on the sidelines, looking into your life, waiting for you to glance away and see me, if only for a second. I guess that’s what people mean when they say other people are another league. You were about a hundred leagues above me and I was standing awkwardly in the outskirts, waiting for my turn. I hated it but I knew there wasn’t much I could do. I hardly saw you around school; the only time together we shared was lunch, and that was when you were surrounded. I sat back, and I waited.

Ah, high school. Movies told us one description of it; books and other stories another. None of it prepared any of us for what waited behind the walls of the buildings. I didn’t expect a moment of what was going to happen over the next three years.

Freshman year was a strange transition point, but you took it in stride. You managed to settle into the folds of the school as if they had reserved a spot there for you. You weren’t popular, but you weren’t unknown. You were comfortably in the middle, and I was circling the waters underneath of you, trying to find a way up. Eventually, a ladder was dropped into the water, and I managed to climb.