friendship and the beauty of shared delusion

forgive the clickbaity title, i couldn’t help myself.

my middle school crush was the half-french, sort-of popular, attractive new kid. let’s call him jacques. i would love to like him from afar, much too shy to actually even attempt to have any meaningful conversations.

regardless, like any good middle schooler, i confided in my best friend about my crush. a deeply held secret, though hardly worth keeping. because from the moment jacques stepped off the train / boat / hot air balloon from australia (oh, did i mention he was half australian too? with an accent and everything), girls were swooning left and right. in fact, i’d estimate that half the girls in our year had a crush on him. as far as crushes go, it was a pretty basic one.

a few months into the school year, we went on a two-week class trip. as you might expect, putting a bunch of 14 year olds in a small space for extended periods of time with spotty adult supervision and raging hormones, leads to a lot of drama.

rumor had it jacques had a crush on someone on the trip, but no one knew who.

as one is when one is young, i was an optimist. i hoped that the mystery girl was me.

my best friend did too. in fact, she was more hopeful than i was. i remember feeling this shared excitement and hope about who his crush could be. we talked about it a fair amount, about why it could be me, about how it might make a lot of sense.

in true dramatic fashion, on the last day of the trip at the airport, jacques finally asked his crush to be his girlfriend.

the attentive reader may have guessed by now that it wasn’t me.

my high school self would later think back to this time i spent thinking about my crush. all the time my best friend and i spent talking about my crush. all the clues. how childish it all was, believing that i had a shot with the most desirable boy in our grade. it took many years to stop obsessing over boys who probably didn’t know i existed, but i got there eventually.

but looking back now, i think it’s sort of wonderful. there’s something really beautiful about it. my friend wasn’t “supportive” or “understanding”. she mirrored my hopes and dreams, saw me how i saw myself. she really believed that i could be the subject of this boy’s attention. there was something really pure and magical about it. the creation of a space that is necessarily untethered from reality, and in doing so is sort of limitless.

i don’t know how uncalibrated we were – i still haven’t quite figured out where in the middle class hierarchy i stood, what my chances were. and, the girl jacques did pick was actually kind of normal – not that different from myself, at least to me.

what i do know is that i would much rather be an uncalibrated girl going through the teenage crush of rejection with my best friend to live through it with me, than a calibrated one facing it alone.