Was there love there?

When I was a senior in high school, there was a girl I liked.
That was about 30 years ago, wasn't it? Wow.


Back then, I couldn't talk to girls. It wasn't because of some past trauma or anything. I was just embarrassed, and I kept waffling, afraid of being ignored or treated coldly, so I couldn't take that first step.

I would wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, feel disappointed in my own face, and think about nothing but that.


The girl I liked arrived at school early in the morning. She would enter the classroom at 8:07 every morning. Having happened to find that out, I would lie in wait.


Thinking, "I need a chance to talk to her one-on-one!", I started arriving at school to match 8:07. She wasn't the type to hang out and chat with friends; she seemed like a quiet person.


But,


I couldn't,



say hello.



I just couldn't get the words "Good morning!" out. The "G" wouldn't come out of my mouth. Thinking about it now, it's so unnatural that there were only two of us in the classroom and we didn't greet each other or talk. It's actually kind of creepy.


Several months passed, and I finally managed to say "Good morning!" But I couldn't hold a conversation beyond that.

Time flowed by while I was dithering, and in the end, without ever exchanging words with her,we reached the graduation ceremony in March.


The final homeroom. The teacher handed out thegraduation anthologyin the classroom. It was a collection of essays where all the graduates wrote about themselves. I opened the page for the girl I liked first.



It was a shock.



There was an unbelievable sentence written there.



Other classmates filled their entire page with memories of friends and stories about school events. Yet, she had only written one sentence. "I liked Yasu"... No, no way. It was a sentence I hadn't even imagined.





"It was not a very fun high school life."





It was a shock.

And I regretted it deeply.



...I messed up.
I messed up!!!!!!!!



To write something like that in a graduation anthology. The teacher must have definitely asked her, "Are you really sure about this?" And yet she wrote it. How boring must her high school life have been?


Why didn't I reach out to her? If I had gathered the courage to talk to her, even if we couldn't have been lovers, we might have been friends. We might have had fun together, talking nonsense like "School is so boring, right?" She might have been able to smile even a little. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe... I messed up. I really messed up.


I want to live my life reflecting on things, but without regrets.


But this was the one time I felt immense regret. When my geeky friend, who knew I liked her, came over and showed me her page in the anthology saying, "Yasu, look at this...", I was completely absent-minded. I don't even remember what I replied.


When I got home, even the tofu in the warm miso soup my mother made for lunch was so heavy on my stomach that I felt like throwing up from the shock.


I had only been looking at myself the whole time.


Thinking things like, "If I act, I might be hated," "I might be thought of as gross," or "I might be annoying," was all because "I didn't want to get hurt." If you want to entertain or love someone, what's the point of only looking at yourself?


From that day on, my actions changed.


Make the person in front of you laugh. No matter what they think of me, I will do my best to entertain the people I meet. I don't know if I can do it. I might fail. But I will try my best.


Because I never want to make someone I like feel sad ever again.

#MonokaKingdom2023

[Image cooperation: Sachiwa]

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Kiyofumi Noto
A money expert for the 100-year life era who loves the Japanese spirit (7th book "The World's Safest Textbook on US Treasury Bonds and Dollar-Denominated Corporate Bonds" is now on sale!). What is "US Treasury Bond Investment" for Japanese people? Number of channel subscribers: 20,000! Total viewers: 1 million!
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