an exception

It wasn't a crush. I just took an interest in him.

It couldn't have been a crush, because we could never have been a couple. He was a dead end. He was immature, possibly a misogynist, almost certainly an idiot. He didn't understand most of the things I said to him. He was pretty, but prettiness alone couldn't have made him that interesting to me.

He took an interest in me. He found me enthralling, baffling. He thought he knew what women were; an ugly, simplistic perception of a mysterious monolith out to get him for no other reason than undirected spite. What made me stand out to him I never quite understood, but from the first time we met he told me I was different, not like the others. He would follow me around, asking me questions about my life and not understanding any of the answers. He would stare at me in wonder when I rejected any of his certainties about women, the backstabbing bitches who hate all their friends. You're amazing, I've never met anyone like you.

It was probably this, rather than anything about him, that made my interest so enduring. I couldn't work out why this guy, this pretty woman-hating dropout with no real interest in the world, would be so fascinated by an overweight feminist dork who read books on her lunch break. When he sat next to me and asked, So what do you look for in a guy? Do you like guys with tattoos? What about tattoos like mine? I would answer the questions as calmly as possible while my brain screamed Why do you even care? behind my eyes.

I didn't fit into the world as he'd constructed it. Talking to me was like reading a book; he'd drift into a place of let's say I was going out with you for a while, then our shifts would end and he'd close up the fantasy and go back to the real world, the way things actually were. You can't live in a book.

He had obligations, ones he didn't tell me about and ones which made his escapist questions and hypotheticals much more damaging in retrospect. But it made sense. He had a real life that he didn't much like, and now he could come into work and pretend it wasn't happening.

I don't know how long the interest lasted for him. For me, it lasted much longer than it should have, long after we stopped working together, long after I stopped seeing him with any regularity. It lasted through an entire other relationship I had. My then-boyfriend saw him more often than I did and would sometimes say things like he asks about you before he even says hello, but I don't think he thought anything of it. After all, there was no chance of anything happening there.

I saw him after my break-up, after his divorce, several years after we first met, and we swapped numbers. My mother suggested that maybe I could make something happen. And maybe I considered it, for a moment.

I would have disappointed him. I would have cried, and said mean things sometimes, and done some things that Women do. He wasn't interested in me because he thought I was any kind of real person, and I didn't take an interest in him because I wanted to be any kind of real person. I didn't like his framing of me as the saving grace of my gender, but having spent years feeling absolutely ordinary and unremarkable, the way he reacted to me was revelatory. I was unfathomable to him, I was nothing he'd ever imagined existed, I put his whole view of the world on shaky ground. It was unhealthy, unquestionably, for both of us, and maybe we would both have been better off not knowing each other, not having this strange, awkward interest that spanned years for no real reason making other relationships more difficult for us. Maybe I shouldn't remember it with any kind of fondness.

Maybe.