When I was very little, after my family unit had catastrophically failed, my mom had taken me to a music festival. Late at night, I was laying in the front seat of our little Mazda, not asleep, but still and quiet. My mom was flirting and cavorting with a guy she'd met. For me, it had been years of being afraid of my dad whenever he was around. I had no model to feel safe with anyone being with my mom. At some point she got scared and protested, and my brain broke, and I ran off into the night festival to find safety or help or whatever your little animal mind does when it's little and scared to death.
My first attempt at trying to approach a girl was in 6th grade, when a group of girls would watch our basketball practices after school, and one of them asked if I'd walk her home. So I did, and it was nice. The next day at school she told everyone she could tell about how she had won a bet to walk home with the weird kid. It was devastating, and that was mostly it for me for about `10 years. It was on to skiing, and then Crested Butte at age 18 where I was completely a child among adults in a 7 to 1 male female ratio. Then fire crews where it was more like 20 to `1. I had absolutely no idea what to do with women, and no way to learn, and yet all the natural feelings toward the few of them that were always around.
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