Desperation is a Dirty Word

Will second year be different?

It’s similar with love, I’ve learnt this year. Maybe my tales of lust under the sweating ceilings of Ziggys haven’t given you the impression that love has been on my mind, but it has. Over the rest of the year you know who I couldn’t get off my mind. He invaded my mind thoughts like an enduring head cold.

Every time I saw him so much as talking to another girl in day light I felt sick. Every time I saw him dancing with another girl out at night I wanted to go and kiss a stranger in front of him to make him jealous. The only flaw in this plan was that he wouldn’t have been jealous. He’d only have thought me more of a slag than he probably already did.

I’d see his name everywhere. I’d pass Thomas Cook and curse the people who worked there for working in a place that shared his name. I’d be filled with angst when I had to read anything by a Thomas Seymour, or a J. B Thomas, or even a Tomlinson, or a Thompson, or a Tompkins.

Was this love? I couldn’t get him off my mind. I analysed his every move. He’d nod at me from across the quad… did he want me to come over and say hi? Was he trying to avoid talking to me? Was he wearing the same T-Shirt as last night? Was this out of boyish laziness? Or had he had to get dressed into the same clothes that morning? Which bitch had seen his naked body before he re-clad himself in that bloody T-Shirt this morning? Surely this couldn’t be what love was.

And, eventually I learnt that actually, this was love. This was unrequited love. Every negative feeling that went with my obsession was a side effect of unrequited love. If he had loved me back, then the feelings that lead me to travel on these trains of thought, obsessing about where he was, and who that girl was, and why he was wearing the same T-Shirt as yesterday, would have lead me elsewhere. But as it was, he didn’t love me back, and my thoughts were free to grow wild.

I learnt something else as well. If he had loved me back, he’d still have been the same. He’d still have been that same twisted boy who posts bras through letter boxes, and who says “got milk?”, and who is incessantly arrogant. If he’d loved me back, it would probably all have ended far sooner than it did. We’d have spent a lot of time together, and we’d have got sick of each other, and we’d have hated each other.

So in my first year at uni, I learnt that sometimes you can be desperate for love. You can be desperate to be in love, and to be loved, and you can throw yourself through the first window that opens. Desperation can lead you to settle for something thoroughly inappropriate, something you convince yourself you want, but you don’t. But I’ve also learnt that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. How much more special requited love will feel after experiencing this.

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