Doomed Romance

I have a secret crush, a lot like most of the girls in my class. What’s different is who my crush is on. It’s not on the prince of the school (like we really have one here). It’s not on a boy I’ve known since elementary school. It’s not a coworker. I’ve only known this guy for almost a year. We haven’t been close for very long either. He’s very handsome and cool and fun and
He’s a teacher at my school. He’s a newish teacher and he’s one of the teachers in charge of my class. He doesn’t know. Well I think he doesn’t know anyway. I hope he doesn’t know because if he found out I would be completely mortified and never come to school again. I used to skip school a bit but I don’t mind coming now because I get to see him. I still skip classes, hang out in the nurses room with a stomach ache but I’m still at school and as long as I’m at school there’s a chance that I can see him and that makes it ok. It probably seems like I’m really scatterbrained to him, always messing up forms or something. But I really do it because it makes him speak to me. I don’t play sports and I’m a girl so if it weren’t for messing up my forms we wouldn’t get to talk as much as we do.
I’ve never been shy around him either, but I’m not a shy person and I think that goes a long way to disguising my feelings. If I suddenly got quiet around him it would be really obvious. So I just change how I act with everyone else. I stand a bit too close to everyone, touch everyone more. That way when I stand close to him it just seems like I’m disrespecting people’s personal space again and not that I’m showing my feelings.
It doesn’t hurt, because it’s not like I have any idea that I’ll actually get it, his love that is. Being close to him isn’t painful, seeing him talk with other girls doesn’t make me jealous. I have no expectations of ever having him look at me the way I try not to look at him. While this doesn’t mean I don’t think about how someday it would be nice to run into him and have him fall in love with me, it’s not an all consuming thought. I have many more all consuming thoughts like work tonight and how I’m going to pass my English test this week. It’s something fun that distracts me from the forms which are telling me exactly what I’ll be doing for a bit after graduation. While it’s true I should stick with one company I could see myself going other places. My crush on sensei* is kind of like that. I can see my eye shifting down the years. I’m not one of those heroines who will carry her first love with her for the rest of eternity. I’ll leave high school in April and I’m almost positive I’ll meet someone else. I make friends easily though people,e are sometimes put off by how loud I am. I think he’s a little put off too but he’s patient with me. He’s put off because he’s worried. I hope he’s not put off because he’s figured out that I like him. I don’t want him to find out because he wouldn’t understand. He would think I’m just so stupid loud girl in love with her teacher but that isn’t it and while I don’t know what it is, that isn’t it. This is why when we talk I deliberately shift my attention to everything else in the room. IN a way it prolongues how much time we get to spend. I don’t care if he thinks I’m flightly. I am and I’m sure someone will ike that even if he doesn’t.
Our time is ending. This crush has a clock on it. I’ve decided that my feelings for sensei will end when the school year ends. I’m not going to tell him on graduation day or anything so dramatic. I’ve just decided that when I leave school for the last time on that day I will leave my feelings in my desk for whoever wishes to occupy it next. I’ll just walk away from them. I think then, if he found them there, it would be okay and like I said, years later he can meet up with me and I can find my feelings again. But I’m a high school student so a little doomed romance is okay, ne?
Sensei- teacher
Ne- isn’t it, it’s a sentence ender.
I saw this girl outside a school I walked past in the city. She was really vibrant and definitely posessesd that “zest for living” MEXT is always saying its my job to instill. She was standing really close to the male teacher who looked both oblivious and utterly aware of what her body language was saying. He looked like he was picking up on her feelings subconsciously but consciously she was just standing obnoxiously close (I even thought so and I come from a huge family that has no concept of personal space).