Day 2 - Unrequited love

UNREQUITED

Prompt - Unrequited : How do you feel when you love someone who does not love you back?

I saw her immediately I went into the lecture theatre.  Jean was in row eight, out to the right.  I slotted myself into ten, fairly central, so I had a viewing angle that let me observe her profile.  Which I did, frequently.  Too frequently to grasp what Professor thompson was saying, but seventeenth century European political intrigue didn't stand a chance against my obsession.  Not that she knew anything about it.

Medium height, slim figured, a mass of brown curls on top, freckled finely across the bridge of her nose, an strong-jawed oval face with a cute nose and eyes that looked so soft and limpid to my fevered imagination, but of a colour I'd never yet got close enough to determine.  She wasn't classically beautiful - the cheeks a little too red, the features too much a mix of delicate and coarse -  but I saw her in the crowd as we walked to our first lecture of the term, and couldn't see anyone else after that.  She fascinated me, quickly became the object of my dreams and fantasies, a focal point of a mania I couldn't step away from.  

I'd see her three times a week in lectures, a few times in the union bar.  Once on a night out, in a group that included someone I knew tangentially.  But I made no move, too consumed with my own inadequacies to consider the possibility that she might have the slightest interest in someone like me.  And so the non relationship continued to non develop, while the fantasy one blossomed.  She became my steady girlfriend.  We were in a band together.  We travelled the world to everywhere she wanted to go.  And we visited her parents up north on the croft, where she was proud to show me off.  

I knew any reality would be oh so different.  Did she even notice me?  I am saddled with one of those faces that is neither handsome nor ugly enough to be memorable.  My features are so easily forgotten that people who've seen me a dozen times forget that we've ever met.  Unless they get to know my name.  And she never did, never would.

Nor I hers.  'Jean' became a convenient descriptor for my imagination to work with.  Jean was a fantasy persona.

To this day, almost five decades on, I still have no idea of who she really was.  Name, voice, background, and eye colour, all remained a mystery.  I was happy with my fantasy version.  And unhappy with myself, for the lack of courage, for the pathetic nature of my obsession, for the way I cut reality adrift.  For reality only oppressed me, when I received some reminder that I was nothing to her, that she barely knew of my existence, let alone devotion, or that I was the one true love she probably wasn't looking for.  

That obsession lasted the best part of two years.  And then she vanished from my life, a life she had no real part in.  And I felt her loss as much as if she had really been my girlfriend, my emotional inner life in turmoil and my sadness compelling.  And nobody, least of all the woman at the mythical centre of my world, ever realised.