The Yellow Umbrella

Conor came into my life in gym class. I can still remember his maroon and gold uniform with his socks pulled halfway up his calf. Can you picture it?


Good. Then you know why it took me until we were out of gym class to develop my casual crush on him.


November 3, 2001:
"I like Conor. Okay, so I never really liked him until last week because he's in my gym class - but we had a study hall in gym the whole week so we actually talked and I realized that he had a really great personality. He kind as that whole scrubby look going on, which I like on him."


Unfortunately, I had to put those feelings aside because when I went back to gym, he stayed in study hall due to an injury. (He "broke his ass" according to him, I don't actually know what was wrong.) That study hall just happened to be during the lunch period of my friend Victoria, and their love blossomed as his ass slowly healed. They dated, they broke up, and time went by.


I tried to deny my feelings because I was supposed to be:
(a) a good friend to Victoria and not break the girl code in which every boy you have ever liked, looked at, or thought of in passing, is strictly OFF LIMITS.
(b) the cool, casual, public school friend of cool, casual, public school Conor who liked to listen to Sublime on the mix CDs he would make me - as a friend of course.


Apparently I couldn't stand it any longer and proclaimed my feelings to... my diary.

Then Victoria.

(yes, I had actually written out the speech I had prepared, I still have the word-for-word draft)

(all that worrying for nothing!)

Then (very mysteriously) to Conor.

He stopped talking to me, so I did what any girl would do. I wrote him a note I would never send and doodled angry words about myself at the bottom.

Just to clarify, "getting on" in the 9th grade meant that we had made plans to make out during a movie over spring break. Clearly, his silence following my bold confession ensured that our spring break rendezvous would not take place. 


Luckily (or unluckily) this whole ordeal paved the way for me to meet the boy who I actually started writing a memoir about because I thought it was - without a doubt - the greatest love story of all time. 


Now I'm going to go all How I Met Your Mother and leave you with that yellow umbrella cliffhanger.