I found out my college crush’s name, which should have been a small victory. Instead, it supplied the missing information for a situation I would have preferred to leave unsolved.
He was the guy I had cold-messaged in my last year of high school. Not because I liked him then. Because I wanted to prove a teacher wrong. An excellent foundation for romance, assuming romance requires supporting documentation.
This teacher had strong nationalist opinions. One day, she claimed another country’s math, informatics, and physics Olympiad teams were only successful because half their members were immigrants from our country. I looked for evidence, couldn’t find any, and told her so. She didn’t believe me.
At the time, my social skills were poor enough that contacting a stranger seemed like a reasonable next step. I was also pretty friendless. Here was someone on our country’s team who might know about the claim and share my interest in STEM. Perhaps I could settle the argument and make a friend. Efficient.
He replied once. Then he stopped.
The particularly awkward part is that I never reached my actual question. I tried to start with what I considered casual conversation, apparently believing I could ease a total stranger into an investigation of international Olympiad demographics. From his end, it might have looked like clumsy flirting. I have no idea what he thought.
Now I’m 21, at university, and interested in someone for the ordinary reason that I find him cute. For a while, I didn’t know his name. Learning it connected two parts of my life that had been getting along perfectly well apart.
I know my old approach was weird. What I don’t know is whether he remembers it, whether he remembers me, or whether that brief exchange registered as anything worth remembering.
I might still like to talk to him. This time, at least, I wouldn’t be approaching him on behalf of an unresolved dispute about physics teams. I’m just afraid that before I can say hello, he’ll remember the questions I never got around to explaining.
