Mary Ellen was a beautiful girl. Petite, blonde and looked a bit shy. She was an older student at my high school in my first year in Toronto. I had first noticed her in the hallways during one of the intermissions between classes. I liked her right away because of the sad or maybe melancholic look in her eyes. She was unlike many other beautiful girl students who were always talkative, loud and flashy. Mary Ellen hardly talked, even though she was always with company, and her gaze was always as if she was far away in another world. On my breaks I always searched to see if she was around. She probably did not even know I existed. Only once did she look at me, even though it might have been an absent-minded look, as they say. For me, at that age and considering my background, it was enough for it to be a meaningful look...a signal that she liked me probably. It was enough for me to start dreaming of a mutual feeling between us, even though I was too shy to talk to her.
I think a person’s background and upbringing play a big role in how that person relates to the other gender. Throughout my youth, until I moved to Canada, man-woman relationships were something like a mystery, not to be discussed. Premarital relationships such as having a boyfriend or girlfriend was something I hardly heard of or saw. Sex and anything related to it was taboo. Eying a woman was labeled as ‘sexual desire’, and girls were always warned about men’s bad intentions. So, even if I am reluctant to make a generalization about Middle Eastern males, I can say that boys like me kept their attraction to girls a secret. Dreaming secretly about the girls you liked was the norm. And with that came the wait for a signal indicating the girl liked you too. One fleeting look from the girl we were in love with would set us off into a fantasy world believing that it was mutual love. Any declaration of such a feeling, we suspected, would have been misinterpreted as sexual desire and desire was seen as bad. The only thing you could do was to constantly look at the girl secretly whenever you saw her somewhere. Talk about growing up with such complexity! A whole generation of dreamers…
In reality I just want to add one more observation that has stuck with me all these years. Because of our upbringing and outlook on man-woman matters, Middle Eastern men (as well as the men of some other conservative nationalities) often strike foreign women as ‘weird’…sometimes even labeled as ‘stalkers’ and as ‘too persistent’. With majority of the men, this aspect of just looking and anticipating is in fact a very uncomfortable situation for a woman, sometimes even considered dangerous. Very few of the men eventually are able to set themselves free with a new and healthier outlook on women and sexual desire…a relaxed and open minded outlook that might come sometimes from living in different cultures.
My attraction to Mary Ellen eventually turned into a disaster. As the weeks passed, I was more and more infatuated by her. Like all young people in Toronto, she too had a part-time job after school. It just happened that one day as I went to drop off some clothes at the corner dry cleaner, it was Mary Ellen who was at the front desk. Coming face to face with the woman I ‘loved’ secretly, made me so nervous, as if she was going to discover my hidden feelings for her. Anxiety struck me so badly that my whole body was trembling. I kept looking at her without blinking an eye as if to say, ‘here I am, the man in love with you’. But no signal came from her. It became unbearable and I just could not wait to get out of there without getting discovered. She never smiled even once as she handed me the receipt for the clothes. And as I thought about the whole incident that evening, more and more I interpreted her smileless face as a sign that she knew about my feelings, and she hated me for it. I sulked the whole night. How screwed up a boy can be, really!
That nervousness and trembling became the norm after that day. Every time I saw her at school or went to dry cleaners, I would tremble nonstop. And I could not stop staring at her whenever I saw her. It came to such a point that I believe she noticed my ‘weird’ behavior and from that day on, every time she saw I was coming to pick up or drop off clothes, she would disappear in the back of the store and another girl would serve me. I got the message very clearly. At the end of that year, Mary Ellen graduated and I saw a quote from her in the school year book. To the question, “what do you dislike about people?”, she had answered, “their persistence when you say no”. Most probably it had nothing to do with me but you can imagine, with the naive and insecure character I was at that time, how personally I took that quote. My heart was wounded. But wounds heal eventually and the memory of the pain helps build up your character…You unlearn many things you were taught so that you can extinguish your inhibitions and restart with a new outlook.
