Second Draw Down

In light of my English class’ theme of Love and Loss I thought that I might share my own experiences of love with you.

Throughout childhood I remember having crushes on boys all the time. The name of my first crush was Oliver who I met in kindy. We were friends but then he moved kindys and I haven’t seen him since. After that it was a basically a new crush every year. I’ve forgotten most of them now but can remember a few that I grew to be friends with. I think it was fairly random who I had a crush on, there doesn’t seem to be a pattern as to who I liked. As I got older I found that heaps of boys at my primary had crushes on me. (My sister can vouch for this.) I put it down to the school being the smallest in Papatoetoe and me being smart. Anyway these crushes were rather weak to what I was going to experience…

We were sitting in a dark theatre and I had been waiting ages for this. I was very excited. My family and I were at SkyCity watching a performance by Joe Labero, a magician from Switzerland. It was awesome and my family was equally as awed. Anyway we watched the show on Saturday and when it came to the Monday at school I talked about it non-stop about the awesome tricks and the big stunts. This was when I was in yr 6, the year that I was in the “Digital Classroom”. It was a class with two teachers and two classes of students but we acted like one giant class made up of mainly yr 6s with a few yr 5s and we did heaps of our work on computer hence the “Digital Classroom”. (It was here that I learnt to type with all 8 of my fingers and one of my thumbs… my left thumb doesn’t do anything.) Back to the story… There was a boy in my class who had also gone to see the show except on another night. His name was Adrian. I’d talked to him before but it wasn’t anything more than group work. He was in yr 5 and I was in yr 6. We talked for ages about how amazing the show was. It was in amongst the “did you see this” and “I loved it when” that I fell in love with him.

I know it’s silly to say that “I loved him” because I was only 10 but I have yet to experience anything that is even close to what I felt for him. I remember thinking how stupid it was of me not to realise how wonderful he was before and that he was so cute. Soon after realising I liked him his friends came up to me and I remember James saying “Adrian likes you.” I was happy but didn’t want to make it obvious. 

The funny thing was that I don’t remember wanting to kiss him or hug him I would have been happy to sit there and talk to him or even just sit there, together. I used to stare at him in class… HOW EMBARRASING! I can’t believe I did that! When he caught me looking at him I remember he used to smile which made my heart skip a beat and every time I thought about him I felt so happy… my feelings were almost physical. I felt like my chest was going to explode I felt so good. Something other than my body that hadn’t developed yet was the vault that guarded the secrets to who I liked. I told my friends that I liked him. I remember one time when we were doing maths I was sitting with my two best friends of primary Aleisha and Erin and I wouldn’t stop saying how much I liked him, I know they were starting to get annoyed.

This was all great until something happened. I can’t remember what it was but my feelings for him left me almost completely. I think it was the fact that almost everyone in the class had found out and that I liked him and he liked me but something just made me not like him anymore. I think it was then that I started to regret everyone finding out and could have been the first time that I thought about guarding my emotions towards people that I liked.

I think that I have built up too many expectations and have been too influenced to feel this type of pure, innocent love again and I think that most teenagers are. Many teenagers fall in love with those with looks without first getting to know the person behind the face.