Prompt – How you acted around your first crush?
Europe released The Final Countdown right in the middle of my obsession with April, and the timing felt cosmic in a twelve-year-old boy way. Like my feelings for a girl that rarely talked to me but one I had already planned our future together, that opening synthesizer did not ask for permission. It declared itself loud, dramatic and damn certain. Yet despite the promise of movement, nothing actually moved. Beneath the noise sat a single lonely keyboard line, thin and exposed, trying to sound larger than it really was. I did not realize then that the song sounded more like longing than confidence, I just heard possibility. That’s how I acted around April… all launch sequence and no launch.
Like every latchkey child raised on garden hose water and days where supervision was optional, I learned early how to entertain myself. I had a small shitty plastic keyboard and a boombox that could make any room feel like a stage if the volume knob turned far enough. I would sit by the window, watching the street below, waiting for April to pass by. When she did, I would press play and hover my fingers above the keys as if I were the one creating that sound. It was theater without an audience performed for the hope of one.
I did not speak to her. Instead I watched and pretended. I timed things and engineered moments that looked accidental but were fully rehearsed in my head. The performance felt safer than any conversation. Pretending to be impressive required less courage than admitting I had no idea what I was doing.
Looking back, that memory carries humor and shame in equal measure. I can see the boy in that window now, red hair glowing in the sunlight, trying to manufacture cool from a keyboard and borrowed sound. What I could not see then was how truly alone every note was. I thought I was reaching toward someone. In truth, I was hiding from being seen…truly seen. I believed attention could be earned through performance. If I looked confident enough, sounded loud enough, appeared interesting enough, maybe April would pause long enough to notice me. Instead, I built a version of myself that did not exist, hands hovering over keys that could not play a single fucking note.
The darker truth beneath the teased hair nostalgia was I did not just fail to connect with April, I practiced and perfected distance. I learned how to stay near someone without ever risking rejection. The countdown never reached zero because part of me did not want it to. Launching meant exposure. Staying grounded meant control.
When I hear that song now, the laughter arrives first, then something quieter follows. A recognition that the boy in that window was already learning how to perform “strength” while starving for authenticity. The music promised departure, yet I remained in place, waiting for permission to be seen. I never left the room. The launch was only noise. The silence afterward was the real story.
Muddled Soma 