Manic Pixie Dream Girl

This memory haunts me monthly: I'm lying face-down on the thin single bed in my college freshman dorm room in Spring 2017 screaming insanely into my pillow while the roommate of my Current Female Romantic Obsession sits beside my thin, pathetic, writhing body.

Mandy, my manic pixie dream girl, feigned interest in 17-year-old me, several years before I understood how it worked, so of course I failed to capitalize and simultaneously developed a terrible romantic obsession towards her, just as heaps of fresh acne appeared on my baby face and destroyed my confidence to ever face and talk to her. Unlucky.

It took years to forget. Various sexual partners who I mostly saw as “practice” left me jaded, exhausted. 

I even muted or blocked her on social media, despite outwardly amicable relations, I could tell that constant reminders of her existence were weighing heavily on my mental health. 

But the reason the memory of this one particular day haunts me is because of how pathetic I must have looked in that moment to the girl's roommate, Liz, who I had a decent male-female platonic friendship with at the time. She is now kind of a writer herself I am somewhat jealous that she shares creative work she has made with people. 

I find myself cringing and hoping that Liz does not remember, or that she does not think of this moment when digitally or verbally reminded of my existence. Not that any of this matters.