That Saturday was nothing special: basically just a long stretch of studying with a few breaks to succumb to the mysterious diarrhea that had been plaguing me. Around noon, I got up for another bout with my bowels, and afterward, I stood for a second and looked at the contents of the toilet bowl.
People my age are dating, I thought. They’ve been kissed. Some of them are having sex. And here I am, staring at my own defecation and trying to figure out if I’d caught a bug or was just lactose intolerant.
It was at this point that I realized that my fantasy self could no longer be reconciled with my real self. I was never going to be the heroine of a romantic comedy, because heroines of romantic comedies did not get diarrhea. It was like in The Matrix, when you know that something’s up when you see two black cats or the lady in red or something. Those were my two black cats: panty liners and IBS.
High school was supposed to be better! I was supposed to be cooler, to find friendship and romance. I thought that in that wide crowd of teenagers, there was my destined-for-me best friend. I spent so much time looking for that person that I forgot to just look for friends.
And so I sat alone at lunch freshman year.
Looking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised. My mom gave me many warnings about reality, seeing in me the vast potential for disappointment. I was a stupid kid, drunk on Nora Ephron romantic comedies and young adult romance novels, where every girl lost her virginity to The One by junior year. It had to happen to me, because it happened to everyone. At least, everyone in books.
So high school was a shock. It wasn’t the classes- I did very well in them, as lonely people have plenty of time to study- but the people. My peers made friendship look so effortless, and romance inevitable. They didn’t have to check themselves or overanalyze the next sentence that came out of their mouth. They had friends who had been their next-door neighbors since childhood and had been their best friends for just as long.
I longed for that so badly. My family was my best friend- they knew me, understood me, got my sense of humor. I could talk to them, when I couldn’t seem to talk to anyone else. That wasn’t enough, though, because my family couldn’t come to school with me. I waited for someone just like them to come my way. In my head, I invented the myth of the One Best Friend, who existed if I just had the perseverance to search for them.
The magic was that when I let go of this myth, in my sophomore year, I found real friends. I didn’t sit alone at lunch, or walk the track alone at gym class. I had people to walk with in the hallways, an underrated luxury.
With friendship at my fingertips, I turned to the next unrealistic expectation: romance.
In my defense, I had been pretty well conditioned to expect true love in high school. Have you seen the young adult section of the bookstore? Or watched a John Hughes movie? All my research told me to expect a committed boyfriend at 16 (the magic year of teenagerhood, according to most books and films), an I love you by 17, and a happily ambiguous ending by 18. There would be heartbreak in there, sure, but heartbreak was good. It was dramatic and soul-wrenching, or at least it was in all the old Taylor Swift songs. She sang about sadness, but a completely different kind from the one I was experiencing. Her sadness came from living in the real world, while mine came from living in my head. Hers sounded infinitely more fun.
All this being said, my mother did try to warn me. She was the one to show me all those movies, and she knew the power they had over my view of the world. She watched, worried, as I skipped through the front doors of high school with hearts in my eyes.
Sophomore year was a deconstruction of this mistaken belief of mine. First day in biology, a boy (a senior boy, no less) I knew from an extracurricular walked into the classroom, and I thought Sit in front of me, sit in front of me, and he did. The Fates were at play now, no doubt. Cue the jazzy background music.
I spent the first half of the year crushing on him, then realizing he was a douchebag, and then crushing on him even harder. As an expert in reading the patterns in love stories, I saw all of them before me:
1. Fates at play. (CHECK.)
2. Mean demeanor, hiding a heart of gold. (No proof on the second part, but with the first, CHECK.)
3. Hate-to-love relationship, a la Darcy and Elizabeth. (No proof on the second part, again, but with the first, CHECK.)
The last part was perhaps my greatest evidence of a future romance, because this boy did not like me. Once, I was talking to my seat neighbor and I said something made me want to throw up. Even though he wasn’t in the conversation, he said, “That’s the way I feel when I look at you, my dear.”
He was joking. I think.
This, coupled with the tingly, blushy, nervous feeling that comes with any crush, made me certain it was going to happen.
But as I said before, there’s a point in life where we realize that an expectation simply does not match reality. More specifically, there’s a point in life where we realize that the douchebag is just a douchebag and nothing more. It’s crushing, sure, but important.
The signs were there, I just ignored them. The fact that he never did his lab work for our group on time. The fact that he was weird to this other girl in our group. The fact that he thought I was a lesbian.
These were all things that no romantic comedy had prepared me for. (Especially the lesbian thing. How does one answer that? Both a straight girl and a closeted gay girl would deny the allegation at all costs, so nothing I could say would be effective.)
I kicked myself for not realizing it sooner, and for not listening to my mother. Rookie mistake! Always listen to your mother! My crush took a while to go away, as crushes do, and I tried harder to keep it together, to put on my resting bitch face and let it all pass. I had an AP exam to prepare for, and I was going to try my hardest to excel even though the cute boy in front of me had already predicted I would only get a three out of five.
I got a five.
By the end of the year, I discovered that my epic miscalculation was a necessary step in my emotional growth. From then on, I kept my expectations in check.
That’s a lie, actually. My expectations are, unfortunately, as high as they ever were.
But part of that was true. I had to experience it all- the falling, the crashing, the getting back up- by myself. No amount of warnings can teach you what life can, which is that 1) reality is never what you think it will be, and 2) you can handle that fact.
That boy went to Harvard, and I’m sure he’s having a wonderful time being a douchebag over there. I’m not sure what his deal is, but I’ve made the wonderful realization that it’s not my problem.
My expectations still loom over me, exceedingly tall. I still feel the longing for a miracle and the unfounded certainty that it will one day happen. As Mulder would say in The X-Files, I want to believe. It’s not progress, but it will have to be enough for now.
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