Shall we talk about love? Part 2
Hello,
this is Yasuda.
Last time, I wrote about love in elementary and junior high school.
Click here for the article.
This time, I'll be bringing you the high school chapter, where I displayed my super shy, chicken-hearted nature.
"A girlfriend? What's that? Is it edible?"
In the female-dominated badminton club, the boys felt out of place.
When I was in high school,
I spent all my time on badminton and Monster Hunter.
I think it was my second year of high school.
Back when I was in high school,
badminton was still
in the heyday of Ogushio,
so it had a strong image as a sport for women.
My high school club also
had an unbalanced composition of
7 boys and over 20 girls.
Because of that, practicing with the girls' badminton team
became a daily occurrence.
When we did knock practice there,
I started to get a little interested in
one of the girls I was practicing with...
Once you start caring,
you really care a lot!
Before I knew it, I was
following her with my eyes during practice.
However, as a super shy person, I
couldn't talk to her at all...
Even during knock practice,
I could only watch from behind...
(I'm a bit creepy, aren't I?)
I got the email address of that girl I was interested in.
When I got her email address through some random chance,
I was incredibly happy!
Back then, email addresses were
name_birthday_favorite thing followed by
@vodafone.ne.jp, @ezweb.ne.jp, or docomo.ne.jp.
Girls in particular would take purikura photos and,
to make them easy to type,
would have super short addresses,
like "ia@docomo.ne.jp".
So I would check to see if their email address
contained their boyfriend's name or
something that looked like initials, haha.
(A bit of a stalker tendency)
I also asked the
badminton club's love master
about how to expand the conversation
using the things they like
found in their address book, and we exchanged emails.
Seeing "Re:Re:Re:"in the subject line
growing longer and longer
was a good feeling back then.
The shock of finding out the person I liked was in love with my best friend.
Six out of seven members of the badminton club played Monster Hunter,
we were a group of geeks, haha.
We were practically called the Monster Hunter Club.
The only one who didn't play Monster Hunter
was the badminton club's love master.
We were so obsessed with Monster Hunter that
unknown upperclassmen and students would
flock to our club room
(since it was co-op play, we were always calling for backup).
The kind of game those who were obsessed with Monster Hunter would end up playing.
If you died during a quest,
you had toreveal a secret.
This was surprisingly tough.
Because we were all experts who rarely "fainted" (died)
from monster attacks.
So it turned into player-versus-player combat.
(Monster Hunter is a game about hunting monsters, but
you can get in the way of your fellow players.)
Among them, Yasuda, who rarely fainted,
became the target.
Four against one is impossible to win! (including the monster)
The terrifying monsters known as humansattacked Yasuda,
and as expected, he fainted.
I announced that I liked
Ms. XX from the girls' badminton club.
Then, my friend started acting
a bit strange.
Even though he hadn't fainted,
he started revealing things on his own:
"Hey, that girl you like
confessed to me.
I'm turning her down because I like someone else."
"!!!!!"
Hey, hey, hey, hey!
That deals more mental damage
than fainting in Monster Hunter, haha.
After that, I just
kept fainting in Monster Hunter on purpose,
letting go of everything and revealing all sorts of secrets.
I ended up finishing those three years without ever confessing.
Although we continued to exchange emails,
I realized that there was no hope for our relationship to develop further,
and I was satisfied with how things were.
At the time, Arashi was super popular,
and because of my mother and younger sister,
I became somewhat knowledgeable about them too.
She liked Arashi too,
and we often got excited talking about dramas
that Sakurai-san or Ninomiya-san were in.
But, should I confess?
No, I'm scared of getting rejected.
I also don't want to lose the ability to email her.
Maybe there's a chance, just maybe.
While holding onto that internal conflict,
I ended up graduating from high school
without ever confessing.
And so,
Yasuda's high school life ended
without enjoying life with her.
Because I was insanely good at Monster Hunter,
I gained more guy friends from the baseball and soccer teams,
who were higher up in the social hierarchy.
Afterword
By the way, the opportunity to confess to her
came two years after graduating high school,
when I was a 20-year-old vocational student.
I drank alcohol for the first time,
got completely wasted,
and called her in a drunken stupor.
Naturally, we hadn't met since graduation,
and since the person on the other end of the phone was drunk,
I didn't get a 'yes'.
She just gave me a polite laugh and brushed it off, and that was that.
The high school chapter became
longer than I imagined,
so I will carry over the vocational student chapter to the next post.
Was I able to live a happy life
during my time as a vocational student?
Stay tuned.
Thank you
for reading until the end.
Yasuda
#66DayWritingChallenge
Writing Challenge Day 34