What happens when you see a beautiful woman?
You look.
Like all things beautiful, we will always look.
Women look at handsome man and colorful dresses.
Man will look at beautiful woman and skimpy dresses.
We all look.
Some look longer than others.
Some fantasized with what they see.
Some even go the extra mile and ask for their contact information.
And that’s what happen to me when I was 13 years old.
I saw something beautiful and I acted.
Of course you can guess by the fact that I am blogging about it, it will end drastically for the author hence the blogging value of it.
It was the first year of middle school.
I left my friends in my primary school and went venturing into a notorious private school in my home town.
If you followed my blogs from the beginning, you will notice that I tend to always make this kind of decision with my life.
Leaving familiar place and people to move into foreign places.
To taste a different kind of life.
Now looking back, it was a childish notion, as no matter what decisions I made, it would have been new to me.
But as of that time, it was what cross my mind when I told mom that I wanted to enroll into the private institution.
Back to the story.
I was a stranger in a strange land.
Alone.
No friends.
No familiar faces.
Nothing that I can cling to for security.
So I did what any mortals under that situation did.
I hid myself at the back of the class room in a corner seat where no one will be likely to bother or notice me.
How wrong I was.
A pudgy kid walked up, placed himself on the seat beside me and said "This is the best seat in the house"
I was not very comfortable of course, I wanted to be hidden.
Why is this kid making it so hard to do that?
"Hi my name is Goh. What’s your name?"
I looked at him and stammered my name out.
"Nice to meet you. Hey do you know that there are roughly 146 steps on the stairs up to our school?"
I shake my head.
He rambled on with a lot more information that I knew nothing about, conveniently ignoring the fact that I never asked about them in the first place.
And that was how I met my first friend in middle school.
You might still be wondering when I will get to the part where the beautiful girls become a subject.
Well, now would be the time.
In between the part where Goh was telling me the fact that the library is located 3 stories too high from the ground, she appeared.
Walking in with a group of other girls and they sat down in the middle of the class rooms.
I could not take my eyes off her.
She was stunning.
Her hair cut to the school regulations fitted her very well.
Framing her eyes and mouth to the exact proportion that made her just irresistible to the eye.
Goh eventually noticed that I was not paying attention to him and seek out the reason for my distraction.
"Oh. Her. She’s out of your league little boy. I hear a senior has already started to ask her out."
A senior? It’s the first day of school. How in the world did a senior get to her before any of us?
As if sensing my ignorance, Goh went on to explain.
"She stays in the school hostel."
"A native to the state of Pahang. So she's been here at school for the last 1 plus week."
"The senior I mentioned lives at the dorm as well."
"As I said, she is out of your league"
Skeptical was the look I gave him.
"And how would you know that?" I asked.
"Oh, didn't I tell you? I am from Selangor and I am staying in the school hostel for the time being."
And so that was how I started my path to oblivion.
Days pass.
Weeks pass before I finally gathered enough courage to even walk near her.
It was in the middle of the second semesters that I decided that I should do something to make her know how I feel.
Thus I hatch a plan of writing a letter to show my appreciation of her beauty.
It was not a love letter per se, just a letter of admiration.
But to a kid at that age, that was equivalent to writing the declaration of independence.
Neatly I folded the 2 page letter and put it into a white envelope.
During recess time, I secretly left it in her drawer and then I ran.
I kept away from the classroom for the remainder of the recess.
Even when the school bell rang, indicating the end of the rest period, I dragged my feet all the way back to the classroom.
And I should have listened to my instinct.
When I walked into the door, the whole class erupted in laughter.
"That’s him. He wrote it."
"How stupid."
"Who does he think he is anyway?"
And many more comments that did not help diminished my embarrassment.
How did everyone know?
It was a private letter.
Then I saw it.
The letters was pinned inside the glass notice board.
How did it end up there?
Only the class monitor had the key to that.
And she was the class monitor.
It took me a while to put all the logic together.
She put it there.
The object of my admiration had humiliated me in front of my whole class.
To say that my world came crumbling down is an understatement.
It was obliterated.
I slinked back to my seat and hid myself behind an upside down text book.
Tears never came.
But the heart hurt like hell, it was burned with an iron brand.
Since the letter incident, Goh kept his distance from me.
The whole class kept their distance from me.
Since she was the center of popularity, I was shunned as the golem in the lord of the rings books.
My grades declined to a state that after my first year, I fell 2 classes down and was moved to the less "hopeful" bunch.
This ended my time of misery in the upper classes.
To them I was just another kid and they took me in with no questions asked.
Of course they knew about the incident but they cared no more about it then the books they held in their hands.
It was then that I understood the difference.
Eventually, my grades picked up again and I moved back into the upper class.
I was still the misfit.
I was not the cream of the lot, but I do well in what I do.
So they put up with me.
Most of the time, I slink back to my friends in the lower classes just to feel normal.
I can safely say the small incident that no one but me will ever remember shaped my mind in a manner that defined almost everything that I do since.
So today, I am who I am because I understand the difference between others and me.
And I know where my loyalties are.
I look but I don't touch.
If I touch, I wear gloves.
If I am confident, I open up a door.
If they walk in, they get a chance.
If they prove worthy, they get more than my heart.
I will give them everything that is mine and more.
Now you understand a little more about why I love my wife the way I do.
