There was a remote time in which I was shy. Actually, shy is an understatement. It was more appropriately a pathological case. I remember back in high school a pretty petite girl whom I liked. The problem was, well, she liked me too. She’d call me home –I don’t know where she got my number from –and demand to know why I didn’t want to come to the phone. I’d see her coming down the corridor and I’d make a wild obvious turn just to avoid bumping into her. She’d scream out my name as I disappeared on a nearby corner. Luckily for me, her madness didn’t last long.
Another gorgeous girl –whom was voted among the best looking and popular one list in the yearbook contest –made friends with me one afternoon in the library. Her aim, of course, was not to seduce me and lead me out of the feeling of awkward feeling of being inadequate. She had other plans in mind for me: I was a prosperous A.P. (Advanced Placements) student in an elite class, known as a book-worm, and though tall and fairly good looking there was a Clark Kent quality to me. This drop-dead gorgeous was the ideal of every child-man fantasy: she took the initiative and was unbothered of the deprecations of her actions on her popularity. It was, I think, part of what made her more popular. She was always surrounded by prodigious beings that helped her get the academic results she was really after. One day, out of the blue, she asked me if I wanted to dance Tango with her. What she didn’t say was that the dance would be part of a festivity to be celebrated in front of the whole school body. I accepted, without that pompous attitude typical of the inexperienced kind. Now that I think about it, it was all I had going for me: the unimpressed attitude. In time, I became so close with this girl and from all of the time we took to learn Tango, we just danced meringue. We spent so much time together and laughed and joked that the possibility of us going beyond was just a matter of time. In one occasion, she held my hands and asked me if there was anything I'd like to tell her.
Girls would never make it any easier than that. Still I held back, and excused myself out of the situation.
Another opportunity manifested itself the day of the festivity. We danced Tango in front of a large crowd -something I'd be skeptical of doing even today, and yet, when it came to the time of asking her out (which was the equivalent back then of making a move), I backed down again. This time she even took the initiative to make sure we are safe from the crowd in an upper floor, alone, just the two of us. We sat on the stairs and I didn't say a word!
She finally broke off our friendship and went out with the teacher's son, and in my mind there was no way I could compete with that! Years later, when we were still friends, I felt comfortable enough to tell her how I felt for her back then. Sitting in the same living room that years before she held my hands in hers, she said: "You should've told me. I would've gone out with you. Of course!" That really did it for me.
I remember thinking to myself purposefully: "From now on, I won't be shy anymore." As if it really was up to me, I said it loudly in my head and I repeated it again over and over. That was more than a decade ago. Still today I find it the beginning of something great. I'm still working on it, though. Wherever I see shyness, I kill it. It's a process. It never ends.
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