It’s weird how random memories will sneak up on me. Usually while I’m driving, but I suppose that really shouldn’t be that surprising since I live in Southern California, and odds are, I’m in my car.

Like that time I realized that she must have looked into my eyes for a while to have noticed in order to matter-of-factly comment on the length of my eyelashes, and that brief flutter of joy that gave me.

Or that time, way after I knew there was no chance in hell, that she sent me a birthday present that made me realize that she had paid attention to me all those years and knew things about me I never knew I had really revealed.

It’s only in retrospect, when the embers of my misguided desperate longing have been so utterly quenched, that I realize that, yeah, she wanted me to be her friend. And I didn’t—and still don’t—even have that much to offer in return.