A random memory
Apr. 30th, 2019 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovemankindI got partway through writing this as a tumblr post, but it got long enough that I figured what the hell, why not make this my monthly Dreamwidth post instead?
I have absolutely no idea what prompted this memory. I haven't thought about this in years, probably since it happened (fall 2015), so a lot of this is just the rough sketches of what happened. I don't think I have the texts saved either, since I've changed phones a few times since then.
So, it was 2015, the beginning of the fall semester, and a new girl had just come to the LGBT student center. I think she was a transfer student, so we were the same age. She had short brown hair, those big round wire-framed glasses, and she was cute as hell. I have never been good at talking to people I think are cute, but this was during the period where I was drinking heavily, and one of the only good things that came out of that was a willingness to talk to new people, drunk or not. She swapped numbers with the other people in the center, including moi, and we ended up texting. This was also somewhat significant for me, since I am super shitty at texting people in general, especially if we've just met. It wasn't, like, a huge deal, and I wasn't head-over-heels by any means, but I was having a lot of fun engaging in a very normal social activity.
At some point within the week, she asked me out. It was unambiguously a date request, not a suggestion that we hang out as friends. I was obviously delighted, and we made casual plans for that weekend. The weekend rolled around, but when I texted her to ask when we should meet up, nothing. Radio silence. I was pretty bummed out, since I spent basically the whole weekend sitting around waiting for her to respond, but I wasn't too fussed. I figured she had been unexpectedly swamped with schoolwork and had totally spaced on our plans. Then Monday rolls around, and when I drop by the center, I find out through the grapevine that she had spent the weekend hanging out with some other people from the center instead. Not gonna lie, it stung. I had this image, which I recognized was irrational but still couldn't shake, that the three of them had spent the entire weekend dumping on me and laughing at my texts. Even the more rational part of my brain felt bad that I had been transparently ditched when a better option appeared. I reread the text, trying to figure out if I had misinterpreted her, but no.
I texted her within a day or so, saying, "Hey, sorry we didn't end up hanging out this weekend - I hope you had fun with so-and-so!" in the hope that I could get the conversation going again and maybe jog her memory about our plans. And, okay, maybe I hoped she would feel a little guilty for ditching me. Or a lot guilty. I'm not above a little pettiness.
She responded with something along the lines of, "Haha yeah, so-and-so is really cool. I really like their face."
Not really the response I was hoping for.
And that was more or less the end of it! I felt really embarrassed and didn't want to seem pushy, so when the semester kicked into gear I didn't bother initiating further conversation. Her major was some hardcore math/science field, as I recall, so she got busy with studying and didn't come to the center often after that either. And I think this was also the semester that kick-started an intense romantic and social drama that lasted literal years, so that tends to overshadow the whole thing in my memory. Also the drinking, as previously mentioned. But man, that really was a strange situation, huh?
The part that still confuses me is that her interest definitely seemed to be primarily or entirely with the other person, so why did she bother asking me out in the first place? She clearly wasn't shy about hanging out with them, and at the time I wasn't even particularly close to the other person, so even if she had been trying to use me as a social conduit to get closer to them, she would have chosen very wrong.
I don't know. This probably seems like a lot of overanalysis for something that happened years ago, but, shockingly, I don't get asked out very often, and when it happens, I am generally not at all interested in the other person, let alone already attracted to them. Like I said, this hasn't been a major trauma point for me or anything, which should be made apparent by the fact that I literally forgot about it for almost four years. I'm not even interested in closure.
It's just weird, is all.
