dreamt about my middle school crush again

god i hope he dreams about me

i am constantly, i mean constantly, dreaming about two people, and that’s my middle school crush and machine gun kelly. when i wake up i’m always like, pretending i think it’s weird (“dreamt about [redacted, for his privacy…who knows what i’m about to write about this man] again,” i say to peter in the morning, who just sort of makes an indistinguishable mouth noise before i talk for too long about a dream that isn’t interesting and doesn’t make sense) but really, i love it.

i will say this though — i cannot believe i dream about my middle school crush so often. I was obsessed with him on and off for grades 6-8, but I went to high school and immediately moved on (to mostly gay guys and like, tyson ritter). and to be totally honest with you, i am not even sure if my middle school crush went to my small high school. i think he did, but we never interacted and i didn’t even think about him in passing. and then i went to college and grad school and lived life and really, truly did not think about him at all until at some point he started entering my dreams like idk, weekly at least.

(i think that paragraph had an ulterior motive, which was to establish that i am LIKE TOTALLY NOT OBSESSED WITH THIS GUY because i’m probably about to look insane hahaha…ok here we go)

it started in fifth grade, when i learned he had a crush on me. i didn’t really know him because we had never been in the same class. but on halloween, when i was dressed as a rockstar, someone told me he was obsessed with me and that he wanted me to give him my inflatable pink guitar. i was honestly like, who is this guy? what’s he gonna do w that guitar??? but being the generous and kind girl i was, i gifted it to him after school. i have some blurry memory of him clutching it tightly, maybe running around with it in a sort of pixy stix-fueled mania. i watched him like, what on earth?? i treated him like a make-a-wish second grader, basically, but i remember getting that first glimpse of the sweet, sick byproduct of desirability: power. my sister was friends with his best friend’s sister, so my sister and my crush were often at the friends’ house together. she would tell me that he asked about me, and i’d roll my eyes. once, she told me she watched him and his friend play Sims, and they had made a Sim of me and him and put us together in the hot tub. I said “ew,” but I thought about it a lot, enough to still remember it today. what did he make me wear? what did he do with my body?

and then summer passed and we entered sixth grade, our first year of middle school, and he had changed. he wisened up to social norms and put gel in his hair, and, looking back now, i think he was starting to learn how to be a man. because he got mean. and girls, i loved it.

<3 us <3

i think, mostly, he was mean online. one time we chatted on AIM and he told me he was worried about his friend, who was cutting. i told him “she needs to sit down with her parents and get some professional help or something” (you guys please do not make fun of me). he asked what he could do, and i said, “talk to your parents and pray…both parents and God are very reliable, lol.” a week later, we went to our seventh grade spring dance. a fast song was playing when he asked if i wanted to dance at the next slow song. an in-advance ask?? i swooned and said yes and we swayed to I’m With You by Avril Lavigne. the next monday, he asked me to play drums in his band. i wanted to, but said i couldn’t because my set didn’t have a hi-hat (you need a hi-hat). i said i couldn’t buy one because it was too much money, and he said “oh, it’s ok.” i was so charmed. it was ok.

that night, i went on AIM and my friend chatted me. she said, “did you know [redacted] made fun of you in his profile?” i clicked his screen name and saw he had copy/pasted into his profile: “she needs to sit down with her parents and get some professional help or something. talk to your parents and pray…both parents and God are very reliable.” (did not include the ‘lol,’ which mattered deeply to me). he added on: “Hahaha, isn’t that preachy?”

it’s hard for me to imagine this being pasted in an AIM profile, but i have to take my diary’s word for it. i was devastated. i attacked.

(sidenote: for the past few years i’ve taken to posting nostalgia/old memory stuff on my instagram and now on substack, and many people have said things to me to the effect of ‘you could not pay me one thousand dollars to post an old video/picture/journal entry/etc like that,’ and i’ve always been like ‘thank you so much but what are you talking about?? i love this shit!’ and YET, now, posting actual seventh grade AIM chats…lmaooo you guys i think i found my limit. this is so embarrassing. im dying. but i do it for CONTENT, CLOUT, and ENTERTAINMENT…i am a clown for you.)

i printed the conversation. i saved it, all these years. i journaled about being heartbroken. Then, the next day in Reading, he walked up to my row and whispered, “I took it off my profile.” the teacher yelled at him. i smiled. he asked my best friend if i liked him later that day. she said no. when she told me, i asked her not to say that next time, in case he ever asks again. in sixth period, he and my best friend were looking at me and laughing. i was nervous. i asked my friend what was going on after class, and she said he told her, “lindsey looks hot today.”

i was back in his hands and could not get enough.

i always hoped he’d talk to me at school, at lockers or recess or during a spanish dubbed Harry Potter no one was really watching. sometimes we hung out at boy-girl gatherings. i remember meeting him at a male classmate’s house with a few of my girlfriends; we played air hockey and drank pop, then the guys put on American Pie. the naked girls made me feel weird so i called my mom to pick me up. we went to another friend’s house once and hung out in his basement. we flipped the lights off and turned on music and a strobe light. i remember seeing his face, silver and choppy, come closer and closer; feeling his body knock against mine before i registered it with my eyes. that same night, our friend dared us to go into the dark, deep storage closet together. I pretended to be scared so he would take care of me. he held my hand, the first and only time.

i wonder if this is why he comes up in my dreams now: he was my first experience with longing. i wanted him to want me again, like he did before. i see now that that would have been boring. i would not have had diary entry upon diary entry about a weird boy liking me. what was better was the yearning. it felt more active. what would he say to me today? would he be good or bad? either occupied me fully as long as they were offered in rotation. i reread that AIM conversation now and i am shocked by it. he really seemed to hate me!! like, all caps, used my name to address me and shouted LEAVE ME ALONE!! hahaha and I was not deterred!! i tried to hate him so many times but it wouldn’t stick. he was funny and cool and so different from me. it felt amazing when he was sweet. it was a reward for staying loyal. confirmation that i was right to like him, that i could see the real him and he wasn’t, really, just an asshole.

my life now is stable. there’s no guessing, and no needing to work for love. but when my middle school crush shows up in my dreams, it’s a far gone yet familiar feeling. i am suddenly on edge again. i am wondering what he thinks of me. i’m hoping he wants me. i would be excited, also, if he didn’t want me at all.

last year, i published a piece of short fiction inspired by, what i have called to friends, our will-they-won’t-they. we don’t follow each other on social media, but i still imagined him reading it. i hoped he wouldn’t hate it. this matters to me, a lot. he was also just a seventh grader. i wasn’t always nice to him. someone told me that he is married with kids now, somewhere in Illinois. i wonder if he even remembers me.

I found this AIM exchange in my archives (yes, my archives) from when we were about to graduate eighth grade. i remember that he was one of the few kids, one of maybe two, with divorced parents in our grade, but i didn’t remember that he had a step-brother. he introduces himself at the beginning because he chatted me from a new screen name. he changed his sn often, but he always found me.

i remember that i didn’t really have math homework, but i knew i had to sign off. i didn’t want anything to ruin it.