Today I spent two hours tracing the steps I took from 1992 – 1999. I have a box in my closet full of journals. I kept a daily journal, starting when I was fifteen years old and stopping when I was twenty-six.

I didn’t read the high school volumes; they are too mundane and mortifying, and yet I keep them around.

It starts when I was nineteen, like so many things do.

I weighed as little as 103 pounds back then, and I know that I have never had an eating disorder. That low weight was due to a brief but harrowing bout with winter blues, combined with a case of strep throat. My normal weight was 110. I doubt I’ll ever see 110 again, but 115 is doable, if I work very, very hard. I look at my body now and wonder where in the hell I can spare nineteen extra pounds.

I was in love with Olympia and I didn’t know it. I apparently had a different crush every month, but one ruled over them all and held me in its sorrowful clutches for years. It seems as though I was so afraid and so naive about sex, that the easiest thing was to just pine for what was the most unattainable. Even though I now realize in hindsight, reading through the lines in the journal, that plenty of boys liked me. I just kept them all at a distance. I was also embedded in a “grrrl” culture that talked a lot about rape and abuse and more rape, so sex didn’t seem that sexy. I was a virgin through and through.

Had I been more confident, as confident as I am now, everything would have been different I guess. I may not have even been interested in him. I thought about him tonight, this person I will never see again, and wondered what it would be like now, if I just ran into him somewhere. There would be no more fear, that’s for sure. I would probably smile, laugh, and say, wow. I had a crush on you. Did you know that?