It might have been easy enough for me to decide it was time that Maddie needed to know how I felt about her, but finding a way to make that happen was…………..less easy.
I had never openly expressed my love for her before, and even though she had apparently tried to tell me that she loved me the previous year, I had absolutely no idea how to go about it.
Words were simple to find, but impossible to say. I just wanted to tell her that I loved her, and see where that left me.
I know that sounds like a low expectation of a potential outcome, but I couldn’t see beyond the first step. I had zero experience of this, and didn’t know what could possibly come after that.
I just needed her to know.
I didn’t overthink it too much for the first few weeks of the new school year. It was on my mind, but I was just getting my head around the fact that she hadn’t left, and was just enjoying seeing her again.
I needed to get my head straight first, then come up with a plan.
When the time came to get a bit more serious about it, I spent some weeks turning various ideas over in my mind.
Do I just walk up to her and tell her? No, no courage for that.
Do I just call her at home one night? Also not enough courage for that.
Could I write her a love letter and try and serenade her a little, and then tell her who was writing the words to her? I thought about that option long and hard, but I eventually decided that it might come across as a bit cowardly – it was incredibly tempting though.
The idea of carefully crafting some words and making such a letter just perfect and being able to carefully plan what I wanted to say was almost the trigger to do it that way.
It wasn’t what I ended up choosing, but when I reflect on this time now in 2024 – I kind of wish that this was the path I chose, it might very well have worked out much better.
In the end, I decided to take a leaf out of Maddie’s own book. She had tried to get my attention by asking my friends how I felt about her, by putting the word out that she liked me.
So I decided to do the same. I thought she would appreciate that I felt doing the same would be something of a bonding gesture. That picking up where she left off would somehow reconnect her emotions to where they were that day almost a year before.
I spent a couple of more weeks psyching myself up, figuring out what I would say to people, who I would say things to. Deciding who I could trust to deliver the right messages to her.
I carefully watched for some days for who she mostly hung around with during the day at school – they would be the people who would pass the “message” along to her the fastest, and would be people she would trust to receive such a message from.
I started with a list of four or five people who seemed to be the closest to her, and started dropping hints around them, and around people those four or five were regularly around – one degree of separation if you like.
I didn’t go for the “sledgehammer” method by saying things like “tell Maddie I love her” – I thought that would be far too direct. I just made sure I talked about Maddie around them, and gave the impression that I really liked her.
Which was completely true, of course.
My observation was that it was working – I remember seeing a friend of hers that I had probably concentrated on a bit more than others, talking to Maddie in the school yard one day, and having her look up towards me. It seemed that I was the topic of conversation.
Now I just had to wait, and see if Maddie came to me. I felt so scared about what I was doing, but there was some confidence in me due to her having told me she loved me previously – I was at least interesting to her on some level.
I was still terrified.
When she did come to me about it, that’s when my world fell apart. All I had to do was follow her lead when she asked if I liked her. One word would have been enough.
“Yes…”
However, that’s not what happened.