That first crush at college

Alright, so for anyone who got too excited reading the title, It’s not my own story. And even if you are one my college mates reading this, you wouldn’t be getting any names or even hints so as to track down the culprits of this short but timeless saga. For all intents and purposes, we would be calling the Hero, my good friend, as Mr. Nivea (Oh Yes, it’s a tradition for me to use the Deodorant name people use as their alias in my stories. You never guessed? Strange !! ). Now what should we call our quintessential heroine, in this little story. You know, well, I don’t happen to know the deodorant used by her, but I would imagine I should call her Ms. Cherry. So, now that the nomenclature is settled, let me take you the interesting bit.

It was the very first semester at college and life was pouring in from every direction you turned your head to. Amidst all of this outrage, there was this innocent little guy, the quintessential college friend who is meant to fall in love atleast 60 times through the 4 years and get rejected by all of them. And this innocent little guy, Mr. Nivea as we would have it, dared to fell for who was considered the ~~ho……~~ most popular girl at college. What can one do, fate has mysterious ways to get you in trouble.

Anyway, it all started when Mr. Nivea realized that given the start of his college life, it was high time that he should fall in love and let almost the entire class know about it. So he befriended Ms. Cherry and to everyone’s surprise, he was quite a good talker (although in a crude way), far as good guys like him are supposed to scale with such girls. Maybe it was because Ms. Cherry herself wasn’t one of those ‘Mean Girls’, who get on the seventh cloud on starting college. Maybe she herself had perfected this social notion of boys throwing themselves at her and how she never saw it as bad in anyway. Whatever were the reasons, our Mr. Nivea was through, atleast in the zone of being able to call himself a friend to the lovely Ms. Cherry.

Time passed, seasons came and went away. And our Mr. Nivea, the scholar that he is, and the poet that he became, was filling pages and pages with poems of interesting conversations that the two of them seemed to have had. And what’s more, he would show them and read them and recite them to everyone who visited his room. Of course, the smart ones among us were able to figure out where the decorations had been added in those tales. There was even a giant pencil drawing dedicated to Ms. Cherry on the wall right next to his bed. Oh, the age of innocence, the age of adolescence.

Mr. Nivea, however, was unlucky in one other regard, apart from having fallen for a star that would never fall on the ground for him. He had some…’friends’ who would encourage him about the rather. They would tell him how he should come out of this friend-zone and come up with his true feelings. There were such ways that were tried to get Ms. Cherry impressed by him before Mr. Nivea could blast the big bomb on her. Even I, someone who remained rather neutral witnessing this little love story was roped in. As chance would have it, Ms. Cherry was my lab partner and so hours have to be spent ~~discussing the experiment~~ chatting up on the weirdest aspects of college life. The good friend that I am, I did the job I was invested with fairly well. Everytime things slightly bent towards a discussion of the students of our class, I would make sure to throw in some praises about Mr. Nivea. “Oh he would be knowing what the teacher can ask in the Viva. He’s been getting straight A’s ” and “Oh that guy is so brilliant, he has actually read about a thousand books unrelated to the normal academics”(Things that notably are all true). She would ofcourse nod, and was impressed, even though she would have wondered at some point why I keep throwing this Mr. Nivea Trivia at her. Still, she and Mr. Nivea seemed to progress in their little ship, their ‘friendship’.

And then came the valentine’s week. Oh the horror and the joy of Mr. Nivea’s friends to get him pumped for a proposal. It was a rather peculiar place Mr. Nivea found himself in. But given all the passion that had been filled him with optimism beyond the ‘glass’, he actually went ahead and did it. It is unclear what words were spoken, and if they were actually spoken, but we know there was a rose and that it was first accepted and then declined, when the gravity of the situation actually dawned on the two.

It was then that our Mr. Nivea was made acquainted to the reality that a girl like that is never…’open’ or ‘available’. There is a busy tone whenever you dial for such a girl and the dialings are a plenty. And after all of that, there is one exquisite line whose connection has been made way back and he would never ever drop the phone or let anyone else’s call slip in. The Half relationship had ended, and the dream was over for the day.

But Mr. Nivea woudn’t rest. The final bullet was yet to be fired and it was something that made him come top of this story, which as a matter of tradition, is one where the boy is always the loser. It was the time for our English Communication presentations, and the topic that Mr. Nivea was assigned was ‘How to deal with stress in College life’. It began with a sappy introduction by some other student in his group, but when his turn came, that man stood infront of the class and the second line he spoke was “There can be so many frustrations. For example, in the last year, I fell in love with a girl, and that didn’t work out. I was so stressed.” The heads were turning as the man spoke and everyone was trying and trying to suppress his/her laughter. Even the teacher appeared to be in on the joke, and we could see Ms. Cherry as mousy, hesitant, afraid and timid as one would ever see her. She must have been praying that Mr. Nivea, in his flurry, doesn’t spill out her name. But thanks to the modesty of the man, he didn’t.

He kept this half relationship a part of his dreamy days, and ofcourse moved on to the next 59 girls in the semesters to follow. But this little ‘flinge’ with Ms. Cherry would be the highlight of his life at college, both for him as well as for his friends. There are such emotions that this story still sprouts in a discussion among us friends, who really know the entire story (Guilty confession: I have kept one integral part of the story a secret here, because it’s not really meant for a blogpost. But Hey, isn’t the story fully fledged without it? :p ).

I am sharing a Half relationship story at BlogAdda in association with #HalfGirlfriend.