A friend of mine e-mailed me in French a few days ago after reading about my desire to polish my language skills. I wrote back in French and found myself remembering words and rules of grammar I hadn’t thought about since college. It’s funny how the brain holds onto things that were drilled into it years ago. I guess I owe that to my high school French teacher, Mr. L. The man had an atrocious accent, but he made damn sure we could conjugate the imparfait form of être. French class was usually at the end of the day, which seemed appropriate because I usually had a lot of fun in that class. It never felt much like work. But to be honest, I had other reasons for liking French class. And that reason was named Hannah S. Hannah was the first girl for whom I felt a full-force, five-alarm, Defcon 1 crush. Hannah was all that and a bag of chips. Intelligent, beautiful, funny. Hannah had a twin sister, but I never noticed her twin that much. Hannah and I became friends through some various after-school activities, but my heart always seemed to thump a little more loudly whenever she was near. We even ended up going to the same college. In my freshman year in college, I decided that it would be a most excellent idea to send her a love poem I had written specifically for her. It was the most god-awful thing ever to disgrace the paper on which it was written. Imagine the worst love poem you’ve ever read and multiply its cringe-worthiness by a factor of a hundred. I never did find out whether it amused or horrified her because I was too chickenshit to go up and ask her. We settled into separate social circles in college and I never saw her again after she graduated a year ahead of me. The last I heard, she was actually married and living in Paris.
I haven’t thought of Hannah in years. I told you the brain works in funny ways.
LIE!
You thought about her in July.
You can go back to doing whatever you were doing now.