This week I’m going to take a step back from some of my more serious writing to give you a taste of just how awkward I am on a daily basis. As I’ve stated in a previous article, I don’t tend to shy away from asking guys out. If I’m interested in a guy, and the feeling seems mutual, I go for it. Complacency doesn’t sit well with me. However, I am also exceedingly awkward in my real-time life experiences. I often stumble for words, and I find myself smiling and laughing a lot to fill in the gaps of time when my brain and mouth don’t connect in time. Nervous laughter is better than silence, right?
Let me set the stage for this story. At the beginning of this semester, I met a guy who attends a nearby college. Though we didn’t get a chance to talk much, I thought he was super cute, and he had a really nice smile. Plus he had a good vibe, you know? I kept thinking that if I ever got a chance to see him again, I would ask him if he wanted to grab coffee and talk. In my head, this was a super easy, simple plan. I’ve asked guys out before! This isn’t something new.
As chance would have it, I was at this campus a few days ago, and I did see him again. He was in a wheelchair, with his foot in a soft cast. Instantly I was thinking, “Oh this is good. I’ll say something clever about how he hurt himself like, ‘Were you saving a child from a burning building?’ And then I’ll laugh, and he’ll laugh, and it’ll be great.” (Let’s not dwell on the fact that my initial reaction to someone being in a wheelchair was “Oh this is good.”) He was just far enough away from me to make it difficult to casually attempt to speak to him. So I made a bold move. I walked over to him. He was sitting by himself, which meant there was no strangeness about having to interrupt an ongoing conversation. With a good opening line, it was the most ideal situation I could possibly ask for in order to bring up getting coffee. When I got within talking distance, I panicked. He looked at me, and suddenly I wasn’t sure it was him! This is the point in the story where my friends got confused as I was hysterically laughing about it later. It had been two months since I had seen him, and we had only briefly talked. Time, combined with nerves I didn’t know I had, and lack of interaction made it difficult to definitively identify him. But it was too late to turn around. He had seen me. He was looking at me, waiting for me to explain why I had walked from where I was sitting to come stand in front of him.
Quickly, I motioned to his cast and said, “How did you hurt your foot?” So much for my funny opening line. He told me had hurt it, and literally as he was answering I was turning around ready to head back to where I had come from. I made a vague comment with my back turned about how it was going to be rough having a cast during winter, and he responded that he was trying not to think about it. By the time he finished his last response, I had already returned to my spot, and I completely turned away from him. It. Was. So. Bad.
If you’ve ever seen "New Girl," I was essentially Nick moonwalking away from Jess. I have no idea why I reacted that way. I’m not usually so nervous in those kinds of situations. All I could think afterwards was how silly I must have looked. He was very kind, and there was nothing in his tone that would indicate that he found my behavior as strange as I did. Which is good. Only one of us needs to feel odd about the encounter. Oh, Universe, I leave this one to you. If I’m meant to meet this guy again, grant me the courage to not act like Nick Miller.
