Dear former crush,

I blame you for this song, and you don’t even know it. I certainly don’t blame my junior high self. Back then, I was a genius.

You had an exotic, pretty name. It sounded like Jessica, but not quite. You’d sit with your long hair in the same row as me in gym class; only my insecurities and a sweaty 14-year-old boy with a last name starting with “J” kept us from talking. At the end of the year, I wrote compliments in your yearbook. They lacked both cunning and substance. When I wasn’t at baseball, soccer, basketball, wrestling, or euphonium practice, I’d think about you. Not about hugging you or talking to you, just about you. You mystified me, until I heard Noel Gallagher’s words that fit you perfectly. You were electric, you might have even been a champagne supernova. But above all, you were a wonderwall. My wonderwall.

I remember one night in my dad’s baby blue Ford Taurus in the supermarket parking lot, I convinced him to not change the radio back to NPR so I could hear that today was going to be the day, that maybe you were going to be the one that save me. I wanted to sing along but I couldn’t because then my dad would know. He would know about you, and how nobody felt the way I did about you then. And that would ruin everything. I was careful. I didn’t tell anyone, except during games of truth or dare with friends who went to different a junior high. They’d ask, “what’s her name again?”

I certainly didn’t say anything to you. Not until high school. It was autumn. I figured the best way to ask you to the Homecoming dance would be over the phone. I paced about my room, strategizing. This wasn’t a yearbook note. It was hard to come up with a reason for calling; we didn’t share gym or any other classes any more. So I decided to get to the point. I called. I said, “would you like to go to Homecoming with me?”

“I can’t,” you said. Not that you didn’t want to, but that you couldn’t. Apparently you couldn’t date until you were sixteen. Something about your religion. That wasn’t important! What was important was that you had a delicate nose and you were tall, almost as tall as me. We could kiss easily or just hold hands if that’s all you wanted. That’d be fine with me. But no, word was on the street —phone— that the fire in your heart was out. Your words. Maybe I should have waited until your birthday, until Winter Formal, but there were other girls, girls with shorter hair and regular names. Girls I actually talked to on a regular basis. Maybe you weren’t the one to save me.