To the boys who never noticed us,

It’s not like in the movies. The girls who go unnoticed, wearing glasses and believing an entire wardrobe can be made out of black, gray and denim, don’t have their shining moment when the biggest heartthrob in school finally notices them. They don’t go to a party in a little black dress, lose the glasses, throw a few curls into their everyday bed head and poof: they’re gorgeous. We look just the same without our glasses on and we don’t have a body-con dress tucked in the back of our closets behind all of our graphic tees and oversized flannels.

We were never the girls that lived for the attention. The ones that planned how we would all walk by a group of guys and giggle simultaneously to allure them into thinking that we were just strutting by and happened to be too occupied by our intriguing conversation to notice any of them. In reality, we walked by with our heads down, not letting our eyes wonder over toward you and continued on, hoping that you might glance our way and realize we existed.

It wasn’t that we didn’t want you to notice us, it’s that no matter what we did, you could never see our true selves. We were the girls that sat in the back of the class, we kept to ourselves and only interacted with you when the teacher picked our groups for us, and even then we spoke only long enough to split up the work evenly and then didn’t exchange another word.

We went to school dances unaccompanied, surrounded by boys that would be too shy to ask us to slow dance. We never got set up on a date with a friend of a friend. We never even went on dates with the select few guys we did know for that matter. And just as it dawned on us that you would never notice us, we noticed ourselves.

We discovered our free spirts, our dreams and passions. We jumped into our cars and drove nowhere with the music blaring as loud as our ear could handle the entire way. We sang and laughed, stood out of sun roofs and felt the adrenaline jolt through our bodies as the air whipped through our long wispy hair.

We realized our dreams were only dependent upon our ambitions and our actions. And due to all of these realizations, we came to grips with the fact that, although you never noticed us, we didn’t need you to. We could make it on our own, we even preferred it that way.

So here is to the guys that never noticed us, the ones we internally begged to give us attention but never conveyed our feelings to. Thank you for letting us slip by, simply unnoticed, it was all for the best.

Sincerely,

The Wallflowers