CASSETTE FROM MY EX

During my freshman year at college I developed a cruel and unrelenting crush on a boy. The extent of my encounters with him went as follows: Girl sees boy. Boy looks in direction of girl. Girl turns red and looks at ground. That was it. That was how I interacted with my crush for two years.

I ended up leaving Portland for NYC. Two years later I decided to return to my old school for a visit during the big end-of-year party called Renn Fayre. It was my last chance to see my crush, and I was determined to finally put the moves on him, for better or worse. I turned to my friends for help. Make eyes at him, they said. He’ll see you’re interested and if he’s interested, he’ll approach you. I spent months practicing making eyes. (Making eyes, it turns out, is really hard to do.) I practiced on friends and on strangers, and by the time I finally got to Portland, I was as ready as I would ever be. On the day of the festivities I spotted my crush. I positioned myself, and began making eyes. I sat there for an hour, gazing in his direction. Nothing. His eyes were fixed on a band that was playing on the Quad. It was then that I noticed something odd. There was someone else looking at me. It was the guy sitting next to my crush. A subtle glance down, then up. The hint of a smile and then an embarrassed look away. I knew these moves. Who is this man, and why is he making eyes at me? Is it possible that having been so cruelly rebuffed by my crush, my powerful gaze had been deflected onto the man sitting next to him?

Its funny how things work. I never even spoke to my crush. He never even looked my way. Instead, I wound up with someone who had a crush on me. I found out that four years earlier, while at a screening on campus, he had first noticed me. After the screening he had walked up to me, asked my name, and run off. I hadn’t seen or thought of him since. That weekend I had a wonderful, whirlwind romance with someone totally unexpected. There were fireworks (literally). We slow danced under a tree and held hands and kissed. Needless to say, I got over my crush that weekend. As I was leaving Portland I jotted down my address on a scrap of paper and drove away. A few months later, I got this mixed tape in the mail. It was decorated with the bracelets we had worn in order to attend the parties on campus that weekend. It was addressed to “My Renn Fayre Girl.” If you read this Chris- thank you.

Claire Heitlinger has a B.A. in Narrative and Testimony Studies from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. She has worked in the archives of Columbia’s Oral History Research Office and with the national oral history project, StoryCorps. She works as a publicist for Continuum Books with the 33 1/3 series of books on influential and seminal albums. On weekends she tends bar at Brooklyn-based music venue, Barbès.