First Post Ever

     It makes sense, I think, to talk about Fall in my first post, since it is Fall.  Three of the five important romantic relationships in my life started in the Fall, which has to do with school.  And here end the conversation about Fall specifically.  I think.
    I love Meat Loaf, and I did when I was fifteen, too.  The boy I started dating did not like Meat Loaf, and I should have known then that I was making a mistake.  Haha, just kidding...no, really.  I’m not kidding at all.  It sounds silly, but who doesn’t like Meat Loaf?  This kid, that’s who.  I don’t speak to him, or know anyone who speaks to him, so I’ll tell you his first name: Paul.
    Paul was one of the first examples of the group-incest my friends and I would engage in throughout high school.  Sure, there was the example of my best friend and I dating for a minute there, and then her starting to date the kid I had a crush on, but seriously, there was some strong incest going on.  I went to an all-girls high school, and there were a bunch of girls who had all gone to middle school together, and who were friends with boys from said middle school.  All these boys went to an all-boys high school, and it seemed like we all just dated each other.  Opposite sex dating, with the exception of my friend and I.  Paul and I were one of the first of these couples, and that relationship caused me so much grief.
    How, you ask, could young love be grief-inducing?  Well.  One of my friends had a crush on Paul, and I decided I should IM him (on AIM...God I feel old) to see if he was good enough for her.  He seemed to be, and we became friends.  I forget exactly how, but we told each other we liked each other, and we started going out.  I wanted to just not tell my friend, because she wasn’t outgoing and the fact that she liked someone was a big deal, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  Paul would have none of it, and very unceremoniously told my friend we were dating.  Thus began the bullying.
    She got most of my friends to stop talking to me.  What I did wasn’t nice, but I didn’t think then and I don’t think now that it was that bad.  I mean, who has lifelong relationships that begin at fifteen?  Not anyone I know.  So I’m now eating lunch with the least favorite of my friends, the only one who will still talk to me.  Including the girl I dated.  They all just blindly followed this other girl.  For a little while, it was just them ignoring me.  Then it morphed into this girl convincing another girl to “accidentally” spill chocolate milk on me at lunch.  Yes, folks, even the unpopular girls can do awful things like pretend to make up with you and ask you to sit with them at lunch so they can do awful things to you in a public place.  This of course was on my uniform, of which I only had one skirt and one sweater, so I had to go home and clean them.  If this had only happened once, it would have been bad enough.  Without skipping a beat, this girl “spilled” milk on me every day that week, even when I wasn’t sitting at her table.  And let me tell you, back milk is no picnic.  I probably overreacted a bit, starting to get migraines the period before lunch in anticipation of getting chocolate milk spilled on me.  That happened for a week or two before it suddenly stopped, and never happened again.  They still didn’t speak to me though.
    It seemed like a price worth paying though, because Paul was great.  I honestly don’t remember what was great about him, but I know we talked on the phone and IM’ed a lot, and we hung out most Saturdays.  And it just hit me that this was happening a whole ten years ago - and now I really feel old, because in my head I’m about eighteen or nineteen, not twenty-five.
    Our relationship ambled along, with the requisite frenzied make-out sessions and the raging erections on his part that never got any attention from me.  Hey, it’s not my fault, I didn’t know what to do, and it’s not like he was giving me any advice.
    We had decided to lose our virginity to each other - and I thank the stars every day that it didn’t happen.  We picked a day, the day when the length record of my previous relationship (in which no touching of any sort happened, and I was thirteen years old) would be broken.  We hadn’t gotten around to planning where this would take place, and thinking back there is nowhere it could have taken place, because we were never alone and had no way to be alone.  Anyhow, in the middle of March, after not seeing him for two-ish weeks because of snow, I think, we have a snow day and I go to IM him only to have him break up with me.  On IM.  Classy, eh?  We can argue about the classiness of some of my romantic decisions later, but this was a low blow to me.  I was devastated.  Because oh – I can’t believe I forgot to mention this – we were engaged.  I got a cute little silver ring with teeny purple and white stones in it for Christmas, but it was super secret from everyone.  (And it turns out he got it at Macy's, and hadn't exactly paid for it, so that speaks to its quality.)  You know it’s a solid relationship when you can’t tell anyone you’re engaged.  My friends, the few who spoke to me, figured it out, though.  I mean, who wears a ring on that finger “just cuz” when they have no other rings on any other fingers?  So anyway, he broke up with me over IM, and I was shattered because we were supposed to get married.
    On the plus side though, the girl who liked him at the beginning of the year apologized to me, and we were civil to each other again.  By that point, I kind of wished she was dead, but it was nice to have all my other friends talk to me again.  In an amazing show of balls on my part (because I was even more of a doormat then than I am now), I point blank asked my best friend why she felt the need to go along with not talking to me when I had done nothing to her, and she said she got caught up in the “mob mentality.”  Lame excuse.  Things between she and I would head south later, but that’s a different story.
    For a while, I was a real mess, or as much of a mess as I had ever been in my young life, and I felt like I had failed at life.  I mean, I had it all in my hands, a plan for the future, a love for the future, and it was gone with no explanation.  I still have no explanation, but I’m past the point of caring and I’m just happy that him leaving opened up new paths for me.  Despite my sadness over losing him, I was all patched up by the time school started the next Fall, and I happened upon someone who did like Meat Loaf.  He and I lived out enough stories for about a thousand posts, so I’ll save that for later.