Nostalgia

The other day I needed to take a trip to Filene’s Basement to buy some tights (no point in paying full price for such a generic item, right?), so I walked over to what used to be called the Shops at National Place. Maybe it’s still called that, but they have made a lot of changes. The entrance looked totally different. I went in through what seemed to be the door I usually use, but this only led to the food court, and I couldn’t find a way to get to the other side of the building. I wandered around the food court aimlessly, and started remembering when I worked down the street the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I used to eat lunch in this food court every day with my co-worker Maggie and Lord Merlin, who was working down the street at the time. Most days, I would get dumplings and a coke from the Chinese place, because it cost only 2 bucks and I was more interested in using my money for really important things, like Minor Threat t-shirts and import 12-inch dance remixes. I had a crush on a guy who worked at my office and a crush on another guy who was good friends with the bass player in one of my favorite bands. As is the case with probably most teen crushes, neither of these went anywhere.

Fast forward to adulthood, and crush number 2 rather unexpectedly returns to my life. We end up dating for a couple of months, because well, I was in a weird place in my life, and since I’d had a crush on him years before, I actually thought this could be the basis for a relationship. We had some fun and I even got to hang out with the above-mentioned bass player, but the relationship quickly imploded. So, I learned a valuable lesson: the reasons you had a crush on someone at 16 don’t necessarily still count when you are 30. Proximity to bass players turned out to not be quite as exciting as I had imagined it would be at 16. And the guy himself turned to not quite live up to my 16-year-old expectations. Sigh. (There is a happy ending, for me at least. I met Lord Kissington not long after the relationship imploded, and we started going out a few months later.)