First crushes

There is a saying that goes “The mark of a true crush is that you fall in love first, and then you grope for a reason afterwards.”

‘Grope’ …hehe, get it?

Ok, never mind that lame opening. So last weekend, the girlfriends and I got around to discussing our first crush over dinner. (If you are interested to learn about the other topics we discussed, check out Dailytoe’s blog.)

It turns out that all of us remember our first crushes clearly and on hindsight, that first experience gave us an interesting insight to why we act the way we do now in our dating life.

Girlfriend 1 told us that she was only 9 years old when she had a huge crush on an exchange student, Earl, who joined her local school. Earl’s father is in the army and his family was posted there for a little while. He was the only Eurasian in her neighborhood and our little Chinese friend discovered at that infant age that she is a little SPG. She never got around to confessing to him but she followed him around with puppy eyes. He left the school shortly and she never heard of him again. Years ago, he appeared in the newspaper as some successful hot shot military man. The good news is, he is not hot – hence, easier to let go of – but since that crush, she has been running after ang moh men with puppy eyes.

Girlfriend 2’s first crush story, on the other hand, is rather tragic in comparison. It happened when she was 17 (late bloomer this one) and it was a fairytale story at first and he even ask her to go to the prom with him – only to dump her at the prom! She was so humiliated she started dating all his friends and every guy in school just to get back at him. Alas, her first crush experience earned her the label of a slag and destroyed her self-worth for a long time after.

My first crush story, on the other hand, is neither insightful nor tragic. I was a nerdy 12 year old girl and I was head over heels with the tallest and naughtiest boy in my class who is a little chao ah beng. He has unkempt uniform, Aaron Kwok hair (with floppy fringe) and perpetually grass stained face because he plays football every chance he gets. He is a troublemaker and is always playing truant or making fun of the teachers openly –the stark opposite of me, the geeky good girl prefect in school.

He used to disturb me whenever I am on prefect duty. My duty is to guard this particular entrance to make sure that no one enters the canteen from there (oh my gawd, come to think of it, that’s such a lame duty!!) So during recess time, I am there blocking the freaking entrance with my skinny 12 year old frame and he will come along and find all means and ways to get through that entrance. Sometimes he distracts me by getting his friend to talk to me or throw random things my way. Otherwise he just run headlong through the entrance like Sonic Hedgehog. Either way, it always invariably ends up with me running after him, pouncing on him and dragging him away. Like my opening paragraph, I have no reason to like him but we did grope around a fair bit. Hahaha!

Back in primary school then, your height determines where you sit or stand. The taller students are always seated at the back so that they do not block out the view of the stumpy ones. The same goes when we line up for assembly in the morning. The Gullivers go at the back and the Liliputians in front. Yours truly here is always the third person from the front. Having a crush on a tall person is therefore not easy for a dwarf like me. Except during our stupid game at recess time, it’s impossible to get near him in school due to our height difference.

Fast forward to end of school year, everyone was busy passing autograph books around. We all know what autograph books mean at that age, don’t we? It is the ultimate validation of your status in school. If your autograph book is signed by the popular kids, you are pretty ‘it’ yourself. Autograph books are also safe and valid places for you to drop hints of your feelings for somebody without being out of place. If you like someone, you usually write mushier messages or get really personal. The ultimate would be if you start pasting your picture in the book. Also because autograph books are passed around all the time, everyone gets to read these messages and word will go around who wrote what in whose book. It’s the perfect way to confess your feelings and have it made known to the whole school. So, I plucked my courage and shyly pass my autograph book (through a mutual friend) to him.

He had my autograph book for many days. Usually when you ask someone to sign your book, they normally return it the next day. The fact that he held on to it could mean so many things. Worse still, I didn’t know how to ask for it back because that would involve me speaking to him directly so you can imagine, I was a bag of wreck that duration. But he did finally give it back to me. He trekked all the way from the back of the classroom to my table (second row from the front) one morning to hand it to me personally with a cheeky grin *swoooon*. I was red in the face because the whole class saw him came up to me. I had to immediately excuse myself to go to loo (“Cher, toilet please”) to take a peek.

I suspect that my first ever happiest childhood moment actually took place in my primary school toilet cubicle reading the entry that he wrote in my Hello Kitty autograph book.

It was a very short entry; only one page long. But short as it may be, it was an absolute shocker that he has stuck a passport picture of his FACE on top of the Hello Kitty watermark in my book. (He loves me! He loves me!) He also did the stupid folding corner thing where you flip one end of the corner of the page and write something like “Do not open” and when you flip it open, there is another message like, “Who ask you to open?”. His flip-out message was “Forget me not.” (He wants me! He wants me!)

To cut the long story short, despite that autograph and everybody in school commenting about it afterwards, my first crush did not end happily. One fine day, this girl came up to me and told me that she overheard him telling his friends that he cannot go out with Frou because she is too…..

……. SHORT!

And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, I wear heels whenever I go out and play now. Torturous, ankle-biting, calves-killing, migrane-inducing heels. All because of a boy named Roger who can't date dwarves.