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Stalker Status

General

In high school I once memorized the license plate number of a Volvo that belonged to my crush of the week. It wasn’t hard to do, especially since he parked it in the same general vicinity which I passed by on my way to 5th period every day. It also just so happens that license plates contain 7 characters, just the number of items that most people can remember most easily.

I don’t know why I did it, maybe for the same reason that I decided to take notice of him: it/he seemed interesting. He went to church, I never heard him swear and I’m pretty sure he got along with his mom and his sister. A boy so good and shiny from the outside must surely have deep, dark, intense thoughts. Perhaps I thought he was a little bit bad and that, at the time, seemed only appropriate for someone like me, someone who spent extra time on her extra credit assignments for French class and who quit the swim team after two weeks for fear of drowning (however irrational).

I envisioned the kinds of thought-provoking conversations we might have, so edgy and raw and real that our peers would soon resent us, unable to keep up. Perhaps we could discuss the bean and cheese burritos served at lunch. Their satiating effect, their affordability.

These dreams were dashed when one day I found out that he had begun spreading a rumor about me. The story he told was that one day, he was sitting in his kitchen eating fruit snacks (I don’t really remember what he was eating), when all of a sudden he looked up to see me peeping in at him through the kitchen window. I mean, just really absurd stuff. Now, a license plate memorizing crusher I might have been, but a stalker I was not. And if I were a stalker, I definitely would do it much more tastefully, would make it more casual, like I would plan to run into him at the grocery store, not stand and stare at him eating his fruit snacks right outside his kitchen window.

These days however, I realized that I have become a bit of a stalker. But it’s not the golden boy on the soccer team that’s caught my eye. Let’s just say that if this necklace had a kitchen window, I’d be standing outside of it every day.

Last modified: January 10, 2019