I think about things a lot.

Why people are the way they are, why I am the way I am. Why, am I, in my 40s, still fighting the insecurities of my 17 year old self, my 21 year old self, my 32 year old self?

At seventeen, I so desperately wanted to be wanted. I wanted to be tall and thin, with chestnut hair like my best friend Layla, who had a different boy falling at her feet every few weeks. She was 5’10, and hips that filled out her expensive jeans perfectly, leaving just the right amount of gap at the belt line in case a wandering quarterback hand found its way there. She was a slow blinker, with dark eyelashes, and lips that spread wide across her narrow face. The kind of mouth the boys dreamed of fucking, though I knew she would say she would never do that.

Not her mouth.

No, not her.

Me? I was 5’6 on a good day, and a “fat” 149. Naturally dirty blonde but thanks to shitty home dyes, my hair was more of an unflattering strawberry shade on my very pale skin. I wasn’t good at makeup, but I tried. I never seemed to get it quite right.

Instead, I was smart.

Not the studious girl, like Layla, who also pulled straight As, but only after hours of careful reading and tutors to perfect her trigonometry. I was different. I just showed up to class. The papers wrote themselves. Math and science? They were easy. I didn’t make cheat sheets because I had to, I made them to fit in. During class, I would pull the jumbled crap I had shoved in my pockets out onto my desk and proceed to draw it for the next 50 minutes. Wrapped peppermints, loose change, the occasional key or chess piece I’d picked up before lunch became a still-life during Spanish class.

I aced Espanol.

I could not speak it. I cannot speak it still. Layla? She went to Spain for a week and made out with two different boys in Madrid.

The only attention I got from a boy was for the sketching: Josh (he went by Jose in our Spanish class) would pass me things he’d found as well, things he thought I could add to my art. Plastic soldiers once. A troll pencil eraser. A pair of mismatched dice.

I never realized it was attention, attention.

I only learned he had liked me 3 years later, a random chance meeting at a college party. I rarely went to parties, but I had a crush on a friends older brother who would be there. Josh walked in as Pearl Jam played on a too loud stereo. His girlfriend was with him, a stunning volleyball player wearing a team hoodie and tight shorts. She honestly looked threatened by his admitted teenage affection as he kissed my cheek on that keg filled back patio.

To me, although I’d lost ten pounds and grown two inches, I was still the pudgy faced girl from high school. I thought he was just being nice. Maybe he was. Or, maybe he still wonders what-if, as he thumbs ups my selfies on Facebook after all these years. Maybe I should just ask.

Like I said, I think a lot.