A Crazy Thing

• Gabriela Alvarado, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2008

I’m standing. My vision is blocked. I am at a party. The shouts of people get into my brain but fade out quickly. It is funny to think the things we tend to celebrate: birthdays, graduations, marriages, birth; you name it.
This was my farewell party, in a matter of days I would go across the Atlantic and I fear, would never come back. - Now you have to find us – one of my friends says, after she has whirled me around myself several times. I spread my arms around and walk throughout the room, while other thoughts take over my mind.
The room is full with the people I’ve shared the last five years of my life with: my dearest of friends. I wish to find someone in particular and at a time I don’t wish to find him; my senses are sharp however, even when my mind can’t decide what to do.
Many adults say that being a teenager has been the best time of their lives. But adults don’t know all the answers; even when they like to think that they do. I want to know what to do or what to say. Suddenly something interrupts my thoughts: There is someone behind me, I can hear somebody’s breathing. I turn around and I trip with someone who stands strangely still as if foreign to the game.
I take the white handkerchief off my face only to find the face I was so scared of finding. My heart races to the speed of light, I am unable to concentrate, I forget what I wanted to say and I am standing there: grinning stupidly. God, he is so immensely beautiful; in every way a guy can be beautiful. I feel like screaming it out just so I am not the only one who knows it; but my senses don’t fail me that much yet.
It is amazing how stupid you can be when you are a teenager; fear can really get the best of you so many times: After all he is just a guy and I am scared of falling for him. I look at him again. He smiles. I clear my throat. I say what I have wanted to say for so long.
I was standing. I was holding hands. In the last five minutes I had told a guy that I liked him; a guy I might never see again. We hung around that last night as we had wanted to do for all those months. Right then, I didn’t regret being slow for he was much more than I had imagined. At the end I did leave and I carried with me the enchantment of that night as my only compensation. We are friends now, we agreed to that and I think it was the best thing to do in our situation.
Right now I am standing. But I am not blind folded anymore. And not because I wasn’t at a party but because I had lost the insecurity that blinded my whole life and THAT was something worthy of celebration.