Fate exists, I’ve decided, and I’m its victim.

You know, I’ve always said (usually to an empty room) that you can’t plan anything, ever. I mean, you can plan to go to the shops, to go to school or work – things like that – and it usually works out fine. It’s only when you start getting properly invested in your plans that something gets in the way. I had quite a few examples of this, but to be honest with you, they’ve all sort of faded from my memory with this one.

So there’s this girl, and I like her, and maybe she likes me. Problem is, I’m sh*t at talking to her. I’m good at the texting side of things and not bad when we’re in person provided it’s in a group environment, but when it’s just the two of us, I fumble it. I get all nervous and don’t know what to say, and I get the idea that sooner or later she’s going to tell me to f**k off. As she should, to be fair.

Last night then, I decided that, f**k it, tomorrow I’m going to ask her out on a date. And nothing’s going to stop me. Big mistake. I thought about it all evening, running through every possible scenario I could come up with. I came up with ways to get rid of her friends and mine. I knew exactly when I was going to do it, but failing that I had two back-up options. Most importantly, I knew precisely how to word it. Well, I’d narrowed it down to twelve options, which were based on separate predictions for how she would respond, which were in turn based on an extensive and comprehensive analysis of previous conversations. I should write a decide-your-destiny novel. Seven of the twelve ended with her saying no, four ended with her saying yes, and one particularly optimistic option ended with her kissing me on the lips right there and then.
And I actually would have done it. Asked her on the date I mean. I would rather have asked her and been rejected than not ask at all, and I’m almost certain that whether she said yes or no would have been more or less out of my control by this point, unless I was going to do something drastic, which I wasn’t. I don’t for a second believe that a bit of a stutter, for example, would have swayed her decision either way. And for that reason, it was only going to be 80% about getting the date. It was 20% about doing it for myself, proving to myself that I could actually do it.

Still, I did spend some time thinking about tiny nuances, as though adding in a few swear words to the script might have been a game-changer. It crossed my mind as I was working out how to have the best chance of success that she probably just wouldn’t show up tomorrow. At first it was more of an “imagine she doesn’t come tomorrow, ha ha, wouldn’t that be funny?”, but then it became more serious as I gave it more consideration. I remembered how I’ve always said you can’t plan for anything. It was such an obvious hurdle – and a pretty insurmountable one at that, at least in the short-term – that I really started to believe it and began planning what I’d do if it was the one I was facing, but the irony of it stopped me fairly quickly. Now that I’d thought – even though it was barely for a moment – about what I’d do in this scenario, I convinced myself, it definitely wouldn’t happen.

Well, apparently reverse psychology doesn’t work on fate, because today there was no sign of her. All of that planning for nothing – this is why spontaneous people do far better in life.
Of course, there’s always next week, but I’ll probably have talked myself out of it by then. And even if I haven’t, I sense that my time is running out here: she’s getting bored. I could text her, but that’d be sacrificing doing it in person, which would have shown a key bit of character development on my part. It’d be like trying to have a bath in a shower.

The brilliant thing about having a crush, though, is how quickly things change. For some unforeseeable reason, this probably won’t matter in a week’s time. Maybe because she’ll have gone through with telling me to f**k off by then.