You can’t make someone fall in love with you. You can only stalk them on social media and hope for the best. To my juvenile and immature teenage brain whose thought process was at par with that of a dim pigeon, stalking seemed like the perfect and perhaps only option to get the love of my life to love me back. And so naturally, that is exactly what I did. Even though that experience didn’t quite end the way I would have preferred it to, at least I learned a lesson from it.

I fell flat on my face for him the day he joined school. I felt this certain tinge of excitement run through me. And so obviously, I tracked him down on the vast range of social networking sites, and added him as my friend. I smiled, satisfied with the hour’s work. At least now he was an actual part of my virtual world. That was quite some progress for the first day.

“What are you up to? You seem unusually engrossed in your work, if that is what you’re doing” my father noted.

“Important project. I have to complete it today. Submission date is coming up quite soon” I replied.

Pleased with my answer, he went back to his work, and left me alone, giving me time to discover all that I could about my new-found love. My curiosity started off with me spending half an hour to forty five minutes going through his profile and posts each day, and it went on to reach a lengthy duration of five hours. Before I knew it, I had turned into one of those people who I had despised earlier. I was officially an online stalker. Circumstances made me so.

He joined three years ago right when I did! At that moment I knew that we were meant to be! Moving on, I traced each small step that he took right from the time he joined till the current date. In between I found a highly disturbing revelation. There I saw, a photo of him with his former girlfriend. Well, I forgave him. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone makes bad choices. Moving on to his friends list, let’s see, same surname, hence sister or maybe a young aunt. Different surname but his mother also has her in her friend list, so she has to be a relative or family friend maybe, either way she’s not a hindrance in my way.

He liked another girl’s photo! How could he do that? I mean, of course he can do that, but why would he do it? Doesn’t he have the slightest idea that I love him? Maybe he does. But if he does, then why hasn’t he reacted to that? Maybe he doesn’t care. Or maybe he does care and he’s just playing hard-to-get! Upon realising what was happening inside that thick head of mine, I shut down the laptop immediately and lied down to at least try and sort out my messed up brain.

I heard my mother yell out for me so I went at once to hear what she had to say. She asked me to get ready in ten minutes as we were going to go out for dinner with some distant relatives of ours who had recently moved to this city. I pulled up a pair of jeans and the first decent tee shirt I could find, put on a pair of old sneakers and took the car out as I waited for the rest of my family to get ready to leave. On the way to the restaurant my mother briefed me about the people we were going to meet, and somehow I managed to understand how they were related to me. They were basically a distant aunt, uncle and cousin of mine. Great! New relatives to deal with. As if the ones I already had weren’t enough.

We reached the restaurant and went ahead and booked a table, seated ourselves and ordered beverages. After about five minutes or so, my parents rose suddenly and I looked around expecting to find these new relatives of mine. I choked and spurted lemonade all over my sister, who unfortunately was sitting right in front of me. She wasn’t pleased, not at all. Well, neither was I! There right in front of me, I saw all my fantasies and dreams shatter to a million pieces. There he stood with his parents, my future husband-to-be or rather now future husband-was-to-be.

“Janet, this is your cousin Allen” my mother said introducing him to me.

“We’ve met aunty! We’re in the same class” he said with that smile that had captivated me earlier.

“You have? That’s wonderful!” came the remark of his parents and mine.

I looked at him and smiled, offering my hand for a warm handshake instead of for marriage. In one word, the entire situation was just plain ‘awkward’ for me. And to add on, later on during dinner I also found out that his father, my uncle, was my new maths teacher. Smiling politely, I focused on the food with a broken heart. All those efforts that I put in, all that hard work, and all that time that I spent stalking him online, all of it was in vain. I’ll keep in mind to be a little more careful about who I fall for and stalk the next time.