my nervous twitch - and an ill-fated 'almost' romance

i'm a bit of a socially awkward person sometimes, i think. and i develop the shakes way too easily. embarrassing twitch type shakes. i've had them since school, but just recently they got really bad. ever since a certain man would come into work. let me tell you, i really had the biggest crush on him for quite literally a year. an entire year. yep. pathetic, i know, as i didn't even know his name.

but that's the thing with this town, it's very easy to find out who people are, because quite honestly, everyone is connected somehow. and that's one thing that i have a love/hate relationship with, about this place. the connected-ness of everyone and everything, and relationships, and the constant gossip, and people you've never met before knowing everything there is to know about you. it's a community, but sometimes i hate it.

anyway, i seemed to develop a nervous twitch whenever this man would come in for a coffee. the first time he came in, it happened.. i threw money at him, and stammered .. 'ohh s-s-sorry..'. i thought he found me a bit strange, maybe referred to me as the 'odd girl from that coffee shop'. if he referred to me at all of course, which he most likely didn't.

i knew him from somewhere else before this, but this was the first time i'd seen him in my coffee shop. oh wasn't i lucky!

as it turned out, no, i wasn't. each and everytime he would come in after that, my body seemed to take on a mind of its own - i seem to recall a concussion incident on the cake cabinet, and the explosion of a milkshake all over the blender and back bench.

but the point was, he was this mythical creature - way too good-looking, talented, amazing even, to ever dream of talking to me, or even to think of me outside of my now embarrassing reputation of being the clumsy, idiotic girl, with the fringe, from the coffee shop.

of course, as my life has a tendency of doing, i was tackled head on with an actual date planned with this certain mythical creature. it turned out, my friend had been drunk at a pub somewhere, found him and told him we'd be perfect together. to this day, i still don't know if he knew if i was the clumsy girl from the coffee shop when i first saw him, walking to our table, on that ill-fated day. he definitely never mentioned it - he acknowledged that i worked there, but never if i knew it was him i was being set up with.

i never mentioned it either. i wondered, if he wondered.

i'm still unsure as to why he was interested in me. i turned out to be several years his junior - even though he could easily pass for 5 years younger than he actually is. i don't even know if he was interested in me.

but what i do know is that i was not interested in him. i thought i was in love with him - from a distance of course, never really knowing who he was, or what his motivations were, or even his name. but as i came to know him as a person, i decided that the clumsy girl i had been before i knew him was preferable to this new one, the one that had realised the mythical man was in fact, just that. a fantasy.

nothing like reality to break your heart.