The Wonder Years

I think it was sometime before the short recess...there was this girl...Gopika Malkan...She was tall, i think taller than i was at the time, beautiful, fun loving...all the things that can make a boy about 12 years of age fall in LOVE with a girl...so i did...most of you who know me, know that my crushes change in a matter of days...and like the great shakespere once wrote and my tenth grade class teacher acknowledged...I wore my heart on my sleeve...so crushes came and went...never ever really did anything about them...maybe once, but that is another story...for another time...but i knew that one girl in my class, of fifty some people...would always be on my top list of crushes...and the things that i did for that girl...i dated another girl in tenth grade so i could be closer to gopika...i used to want to change houses...now this concept of houses in a school messed me up the first time i heard it...my sports teacher came upto me and asked me whats the color of your house ?

CHOICES: A-BLUE
                    B-GREEN
                    C-RED
                    D- Yellow

And my dumb answer was BROWN...you should have seen the look on that shantaram's face...priceless.....it made sense at the time though....but i wondered why my sports teacher would want to know that kind of personal information...the color of my house/apartment building was none of his business...i was probably 8 at the time... so you can understand the confusion...but anyways...she was in blue house and i was in yellow...and i couldn't stand the camaraderie that the people in the blue house shared during sports events, debates or any such activity...so i bought a t-shirt one time that was for blue house students...and wore it to school, hoping gopika would share just one day of that camaraderie with me...when questioned about the change in color...i had said that my older cousin was in blue house and i accidentaly took hers...i thought that was a smart answer because the t-shirts for guys and girls were the same...but stupid ol me forgot that she was in the yellow house too...so my attempts to come close to MY GIRL continued...while my other crushes continued...i remember once i stood outside a bus...after school for ten minutes staring at this girl...coz i thought that she was so amazing...she was two years older and a friend of my sister...so i stood there staring at her lifting that heavy bag and putting it into the storage shelf...how beautiful she looked...there was a time when i went to mauritius on a school trip in ninth grade...with 14 girls and two guys who were in 5th grade...or standard...whatever you may call it...on this trip there were five girls that had been top contenders on my crush list over time including the great, beautiful, untouchable, unreachable, GOPIKA...so you can understand how totally AWESOME that trip was....and to add to it...there was another one that was added to the list after the first day flying....so yeah...to describe the true feelings that i had for my unicorn is a feat that i would die trying to convey...or maybe i'll just die of embarrasment because of what i'm about to write down

I love your hands
I love your eyes
I love your love
Beyond the skies

This is the poem i wrote for her when i realised i was in love with her...at the age of 12...sitting in class...three rows behind the goddess...wondering what it might be to sit next to her