Was I prepared to wait until the new school year – again?

Did I want another Christmas break with a broken heart over Maddie?

I had to be braver, and I needed to fix things as soon as possible. The longer this went on, the worse it was going to be. It had already been almost a year and a half. I was not proud of how I had dealt with everything.

I felt like an arsehole.

Right near the end of the year, I decided that I wasn’t going to wait – but I still needed to find the right words – I had told her multiple times that the feelings I absolutely did have, weren’t really there. I would need to pick and choose the right words. Very carefully.

It was then I remembered that I had considered doing this whole thing right from the start with a love letter. A couple of anonymous ones, perhaps then a “clue letter” so she might figure out it was me and come to me anyway. Finally a “reveal all” letter if she’d not come to me already.

I decided back then that it might have seemed a bit cowardly to do it that way – but right now, I wished I had gone that way. Right now, it seemed like the right thing to do.

Nothing anonymous. Something truly honest. I had to explain myself, and just put myself out there for my possible execution.

In many ways, it no longer mattered to me if she felt the same way or not. Obviously, I was craving that she still did feel something for me, but that wasn’t my first priority.

I finally had to be honest with her, and whatever the outcome – her loving me, or her hating me – I had to accept the outcome. I had fucked it up, but I needed to fix it either way.

So with about two weeks to go in the school year, I started to work on a letter every spare moment I had. I had a scribble pad – (that I no longer have, but dearly wish was still around) – and I filled its pages with random thoughts and paragraphs that made sense.

An explosion of thoughts that I would then pull together into what would hopefully be an honest, coherent letter full of humility and grace. If this was going to be my last chance to impress her, I was going to get it right.

With a couple of days remaining, I had basically 90% of how I wanted it to be. I spoke of how I felt, how I was so massively sorry for lying to her, how I would accept whatever her position on all of this was. I could not ask her to be with me.

I could only tell her how I felt, and leave the rest to her. She deserved to be in control of the outcome, I owed her that much.

On the night before the final school day of the year, I decided to type the letter up – then I could edit and trim and tweak it, then print it out. All I had to do then was find a way to get it to her the next day.

Did I get it perfect? I’m not sure, and I’ll never know – because I didn’t get a chance to have her receive it.

I tried to find her school bag in the locker area, but she’d not brought her bag to school that day, and her locker was already open, empty and had no padlock on it any longer. I found no moment where I could be close to her to even just hand it to her.

I was devastated, because I had poured my heart and soul into this letter – and it was going to go to waste. It was written in the specific context of that single day. It would have made no sense the day before, and no sense the day after.

I was broken.

I trudged off to the school room in which my final session of the year was going to be held. It was still some minutes before the bell to start that session, but the room was already open – so I went in, alone.

I needed to be alone for a bit. The cacophony of that final day with everyone excited and letting their hair down was too much for me, and it was overloading me. A few minutes of peace in an empty classroom was exactly what I needed.

However, the room wasn’t as empty as I thought. On a desk in the middle of the room was a single school blazer. I thought that the owner better not forget about it, because it was going to be a long summer break where they wouldn’t be able to get it back for weeks and weeks if they didn’t collect it now.

A few other people started drifting into the room as the session start time approached.

Luckily for the owner of the blazer, they remembered it and came to collect it.

It was Maddie. It was Maddie’s blazer.

She bounded into the room, and asked one of the other people in the room to pass her her blazer.

“Damn, nearly forgot that!” she said.

I had been alone in this room for a good five minutes – just me and Maddie’s blazer. The letter was in my pocket.

But I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was her blazer!

I had all the time in the world to catch my breath, pop the letter in her pocket, and start the journey to my hopeful – (but unlikely) – redemption.

It was right there in front of me! If only I had known!

I pushed myself through that session in emotional anguish – the perfect chance was there, and now it was gone.

I got out of there as soon as I possibly could when that final bell rang.

I caught the bus home, and bawled my eyes out the whole way.

It really was going to be another Christmas break full of pain – and Maddie still didn’t know.

This was going to be my last try.

I tried not to think too much about Maddie over that break – but that was always going to be impossible.

I don’t know why I was so convinced that I loved her – truly loved her – without any real perspective of what love really meant. How does a 13-year-old who can’t even admit his feelings know that he is in love?

I wasn’t – but that’s how I felt at the time. However, many years later I would figure out that while I couldn’t have known at the time, that what I felt for her could quite possibly really have been love.

My romantic experiences for the rest of my life would teach me just how wonderful Maddie was – that just maybe I found the right love at that very first moment my heart was able to feel anything.

However, at this time – I had to figure out how I would handle things when the new school year started.

My time with the psychologist – (who I was still seeing occasionally, and having progressed through a short course of pretty mild anti-depressants) – had leveled me off quite a lot. It was still a big emotional hurdle I had to leap over – but I was no longer being so hyper-critical of myself.

I felt I could do this.

It wasn’t as easy as I hoped.

I didn’t know how to tackle it, so I decided to just let it progress naturally – the right moment would present itself at the right time. We would just find ourselves in a setting somewhere along the way, and we’d talk about it, and figure it out.

Once again we found ourselves in different class groups, so there could still be a comfortable distance while I figured things out – but it would turn out to be a very cold year.

Every time a moment did present itself, every time a moment to interact came upon us, it was cold and frosty. Her attitude towards me was not spiteful or hurtful – nothing that bad – but she was almost angry with me.

I say almost because I could tell she didn’t want to be angry with me, but she was clearly upset and frustrated. It was always awkward, and that was hard to accept.

I had to accept it, because it was my fault. I wasn’t scared, but feeling those vibes from her destroyed the small amount of confidence I had built up.

I was no longer sure I could do this.

She did ask about it a few times – always with a frustrated tone in her voice. I had always felt comfortable around her in most situations, but now I was terrified of her.

I could never bring myself to own up to my feelings.

She did pin me against a wall in a corridor one day, and almost demanded that I be honest with her.

That scared the shit out of me. I had never seen so little of her usual beauty in her glowing blue eyes. It still wasn’t anger – but it was a side of her I had never encountered before.

I still didn’t come clean, but this was the moment I decided it was absolutely time to fix it, or never fix it at all.

Was it going to be love? Or was it going to be over forever?

This particular post is probably going to be difficult to write, for the time I am about to write about is very disjointed and very disconnected.

I was in so much emotional distress. I had lied to Maddie about how I felt about her, and I was utterly confused. It was truly traumatic.

I had always, and still do pride myself in being an honest person. Everyone tells little white lies from time to time, but this was as far from white as could possibly be.

Maddie had always shown an interest in me, and I felt that she was probably just as confused as I was.

To deal with it – (at least in some fashion) – I went back to how I decided she must have felt the year before when she had been asking my friends how I felt about her, and how out of pure fear I had feigned that I wasn’t feeling anything for her. How she had probably decided that despite her interest, I didn’t feel the same.

But that created a spiral – I now realised that I had lied to her about my feelings twice. Neither time was it intentional, but my lack of courage, my lack of empathy had seen me fail those two big tests in my life.

Worst of all, I had let her down, and possibly – (or even probably) – broken her heart.

I crashed into a deep depression – for the first but not to be the last time in my life.

As I said, I had always prided myself on being a decent and honest person, so to find myself in this position, a position caused by myself? I just couldn’t cope.

I suffered through it for a couple of months before I sought help. My parents knew something was wrong, and to this day they don’t know what it was about. I told them I needed some help, and we went looking for a psychologist I could talk to.

I was only 13.

I felt that a female psychologist would be better for me – I had a feeling a male voice would just go to the “man up, get over it” line, and that’s not what I thought I needed. I needed a real listener, someone with empathy who would listen to how I felt about Maddie, and could give me a female perspective, to try and understand how Maddie might have been feeling.

I spent one hour a fortnight talking. The psychologist we chose was actually more than I could have hoped. Not the stereotypical older person, but a younger woman, perhaps in her late 20’s or early 30’s – I was too polite to ask.

I think her younger age allowed her to more easily relate to “younger romances”, and she was more than helpful with her ability to “get it”. Her tone was always calm and understanding, and she assured me that what had happened wasn’t exactly something unusual, but that I had dug myself into quite an emotional hole.

A hole I needed to climb out of before I could move on.

Her message after three or four months of mostly fortnightly sessions was that when I was ready, I had to fix it. She said Maddie probably still knew that I cared about her, but would have been hurt and confused by my response.

Maybe even as confused as I was.

By now it was the end of the school year, and I decided to take the holidays to pull myself together, and try and fix things in the new year.

It was funny, I thought – that 12 months beforehand, I had somehow managed to convince myself that Maddie was leaving the school, that I was losing her. That I had lost her.

This year, I might have lost her again – but because of my own stupid emotional response to fear.

I did decide it was time to fix it. I had to be honest with Maddie, no matter what her reaction would be.

I wasn’t going to let myself lose her again.

Somehow, I now felt that she was going to be in my life for a long time – but it was up to me to make that happen.

It is all a massive blur. A painful, messy, confusing and emotional blur.

“Andrew, I’ve heard a few people suggest that you really like me?”

I was frozen in fear.

“No, where did you hear that?”

Even now, all these years later, hearing myself say those words makes me disconnect from myself.

Why?

Why did I say that?

I can hear the ringing in my ears again.

I couldn’t understand what had just happened. I had spent a couple of months building myself up, psyching myself up for this moment.

I was nervous, but confident that if I could just “leap off that cliff”, that regardless of Maddie’s response – good, bad, or otherwise – that things would be okay.

All I had to do was tell her that yes, yes I really liked her.

I didn’t even have to use the word “love” – I just had to walk through the door she might open for me, and see what was inside.

But I froze, and I had basically denied the feelings that I was truly trying to express.

To this day, I still don’t understand how those words came out my mouth.

It was fear, definitely – but I felt that I had overcome that fear, that I was ready to be afraid, to be brave and face those fears, and finally – maybe – allow what could possibly be, to actually be.

She seemed just as confused. The end of that brief conversation felt awkward and wrong.

I walked away in a daze, and I felt broken within myself.

Here I was, ready to unlock that door and walk inside – and all I had done was walk up to the door, pressed the doorbell and run away.

I felt worthless, I felt like a fake. It was a Friday, and I went home and cried for most of the weekend.

Maybe I could get through that weekend, get myself together, and fix it on Monday?

She deserved an honest heart, and I had let her down. The overwhelming emotion was that she knew I was lying.

It felt like she had seen right through me.

What could I do?

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.

I made sure I got to school early that next day. I wanted to wait out the front like I had often done the previous year, just to see her.

I wanted to see her at the earliest possible moment. I made sure I looked my very best – made sure my shirt and tie were perfect. No flecks of fluff or anything else on my blazer.

I stood and I waited.

Experience showed that when she was dropped off at school, it was around 8:25am – maybe a little later, maybe a little earlier.

When 8:35am had come and gone, I was getting nervous. I was confident she was coming back after her best friend had told me so – but what if she was still sick and it would be another day?

This was the moment I really started to understand how much I cared for her.

Yes, it started with a crush.

Yes, it moved to be love – at least in my understanding.

Then it was pain, and now she was sick.

All I wanted to do was be there for her, and look after her. To care for her, and support her. It was absolutely the first loving feeling I had for her beyond that simple schoolboy lust that it quite possibly was before this day.

I needed her to be there so I could be there for her. That she was sick affected me emotionally.

A few minutes later, I finally saw her mother’s car pull up on the far side of the road opposite the school.

My heart fluttered, and I suddenly got very nervous.

After having believed so confidently that she was gone forever, this was almost like meeting her again – but this time knowing who I was about to meet.

Our eyes locked as she approached the front gate, and she smiled that amazing smile that has always made me melt.

It wasn’t really all that long ago that she’d tried to tell me that she loved me – maybe she was still feeling that way? The smile was very warm.

We didn’t say anything to each other as she passed – we didn’t need to. I think our smiles said enough to each other. I know I was over the moon to see her, and she certainly seemed pleased to see me too.

I was still bummed that we weren’t in the same class group as each other – so I wouldn’t get to see her all day like I said during that first year. But at least I would see her every day, and at least we would have a chance to interact again.

Only a few more moments passed that morning, before I made a decision.

I had hated how I had felt over those holidays. Brokenhearted and lonely, and I knew if I ever had to feel that way over Maddie ever again, she would know how I felt.

She had to know now. I had to tell her. I needed her to see.

I didn’t know how I was going to tell her – but I never wanted to feel that way ever again. I had to find a way.

As it would turn out, however – it would not go well.

Now was the time, now was the moment – but now was when it all started to go wrong.