We Should Have Gone With Robin’s Cringe Love Letter
Back in 8th grade, my friend Robin finally decided that two years of silently admiring his crush was enough.
It was time.
He was going to tell Gia he loved her.
Not through friends.
Not through secret messages.
Not through dramatic eye contact across the classroom.
No.
He chose the most traditional weapon known to teenage romance:
A love letter.
Now, English wasn’t exactly Robin’s strongest subject. In fact, English and Robin maintained a respectful distance from each other. But he wasn’t going to let a minor obstacle like language stand between him and true love.
At least that was the plan.
It was a Monday morning.
About ten minutes before the first bell.
I was walking towards my classroom when suddenly someone grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward the deserted side of the corridor.
I turned around.
Robin.
Looking like a man carrying state secrets.
“What?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he glanced around dramatically and motioned me closer.
Then he handed me a folded sheet of paper.
His handwriting was instantly recognizable.
Mostly because it looked like it had survived a natural disaster.
“What is this?”
He nodded toward the paper.
“Read.”
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
Then he said quietly,
“This is for Gia.”
Pause.
“I’m giving it to her today.”
Another pause.
“You told me it should come from my heart.”
I unfolded the paper.
“My whole night’s work.”
I started reading.
At first I couldn’t figure out whether it was a love letter, a poem, a confession, or evidence for a future criminal investigation.
Then I reached the first memorable line.
When I am alone eating food,
and I think of you,
I lose my desire to eat anything.
I looked up.
Robin smiled proudly.
I think what he meant was:
“Without you, even food has no meaning.”
What he had actually written sounded more like:
“Thinking about you causes digestive issues.”
I continued.
When I look at your face,
I see fish eyes.
I stopped.
Immediately.
“What?”
Robin wasn’t concerned.
“It’s from a song.”
“What song?”
“In native folklore.”
Apparently, in the original song, the poet compared a woman’s eyes to a beautiful fish—shiny, graceful, constantly moving.
A lovely metaphor.
Unfortunately, once translated directly into English, it sounded like he was complimenting her resemblance to seafood.
Then came the masterpiece.
When I sleep, I wake up wanting to see you.
I bang the walls with my hands.
I want to run from my home,
push open your front door,
enter your room,
and look at you.
I lowered the paper slowly.
Robin waited expectantly.
“Robin.”
“Yes?”
“You know people get arrested for things like this?”
There was more.
Much more.
But I had seen enough.
We stared at each other.
As his friend, I couldn’t allow this letter to reach another human being.
Especially Gia.
I folded the paper.
“Robin.”
“Yes?”
“We need to postpone today’s operation.”
An idea had formed.
A brilliant idea.
Or so I believed.
During lunch break I rushed to the library.
Straight to the literature section.
I pulled out every poetry book I could find.
..
Keats.
Wordsworth.
Shelley.
Blake.
..
Poets whose work was vastly beyond the comprehension of two eighth-grade boys.
I flipped through pages frantically.
Whenever I found a line containing the word love, I copied it.
Didn’t matter what the poem was about.
Didn’t matter whether the next line contradicted the previous one.
Didn’t matter whether one poet was talking about springtime and another was discussing death.
If it sounded romantic, it went in.
Fifteen minutes later I had assembled what I believed was the greatest love poem in school history.
A literary Frankenstein stitched together from the corpses of English poetry.
Around me lay crumpled sheets of paper—the battlefield of artistic creation.
I looked at my final draft with pride.
Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel.
I had this.
I missed lunch.
But sacrifices must be made for true love.
I returned to class and handed the folded paper to Robin.
“Be careful with this.”
He took it reverently.
“This,” I said, “is your ticket to Gia’s heart.”
Then I added:
“And don’t tell anyone I wrote it.”
For some reason, he didn’t even read it.
He simply folded it and put it away.
The confidence on my face must have convinced him that success was inevitable.
The next afternoon I was returning from lunch when I found Robin waiting near the classroom door.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
He looked nervous.
“What happened?”
He pulled me aside.
“Gia wants to talk to you.”
I froze.
“Why?”
“I gave her the letter.”
“Good.”
“I told her you wrote it.”
Silence.
The kind of silence usually heard before explosions.
A few minutes later I found myself sitting on a bench beneath the peepal tree in the school park.
Gia was there.
Holding the letter.
Open.
Every page.
Every borrowed line.
Every future problem.
She looked at me.
Not angry.
Not happy.
Which somehow felt worse.
“Can you explain this?”
She pointed at a particular line.
Robin and I leaned over from opposite sides trying to read it.
And that’s when I realized something.
I had never actually read the poem.
Not properly.
I had only collected lines.
The words on the page looked unfamiliar.
Like someone else’s work.
Which, technically, they were.
I stared at the line.
She stared at me.
Robin stared at the ground.
I had absolutely no idea what the sentence meant.
To explain it properly, I would have had to conjure the spirits of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake, and probably a university literature professor.
Instead, I improvised....
I said something.
Even today I don’t know what I said.
It sounded intelligent enough.
Or maybe confusing enough.
Sometimes those are the same thing.
Then she pointed to another line.
This time she looked genuinely annoyed.
“Why am I the pale lady standing in a meadow in the middle of the night?”
I looked.
There it was.
A pale lady.
A meadow.
Night.
I had no memory of copying it.
No idea which poem it came from.
No idea why she was there.
No idea what she was doing.
For all I knew, she was haunting the place.
“What exactly am I doing in this meadow?” she asked.
Excellent question.
I wished I knew.
The answer was probably hidden somewhere in the paragraphs before and after the line I had stolen.
Paragraphs I had never bothered reading.
At that moment I realized something.
Robin was standing behind me, very quiet, breathing carefully, avoiding eye contact.
The incoming fire had been redirected entirely toward me.
I had become the official spokesperson for English Romantic Literature.
After several painful minutes, the meeting finally ended.
Gia walked away.
Robin survived.
I survived.
Barely.
And as we sat there in silence afterward, only one thought came to my mind.
We should have gone with Robin’s original cringe love letter.
At least the fish eyes made more sense.
It was time.
He was going to tell Gia he loved her.
Not through friends.
Not through secret messages.
Not through dramatic eye contact across the classroom.
No.
He chose the most traditional weapon known to teenage romance:
A love letter.
Now, English wasn’t exactly Robin’s strongest subject. In fact, English and Robin maintained a respectful distance from each other. But he wasn’t going to let a minor obstacle like language stand between him and true love.
At least that was the plan.
It was a Monday morning.
About ten minutes before the first bell.
I was walking towards my classroom when suddenly someone grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward the deserted side of the corridor.
I turned around.
Robin.
Looking like a man carrying state secrets.
“What?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he glanced around dramatically and motioned me closer.
Then he handed me a folded sheet of paper.
His handwriting was instantly recognizable.
Mostly because it looked like it had survived a natural disaster.
“What is this?”
He nodded toward the paper.
“Read.”
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
Then he said quietly,
“This is for Gia.”
Pause.
“I’m giving it to her today.”
Another pause.
“You told me it should come from my heart.”
I unfolded the paper.
“My whole night’s work.”
I started reading.
At first I couldn’t figure out whether it was a love letter, a poem, a confession, or evidence for a future criminal investigation.
Then I reached the first memorable line.
When I am alone eating food,
and I think of you,
I lose my desire to eat anything.
I looked up.
Robin smiled proudly.
I think what he meant was:
“Without you, even food has no meaning.”
What he had actually written sounded more like:
“Thinking about you causes digestive issues.”
I continued.
When I look at your face,
I see fish eyes.
I stopped.
Immediately.
“What?”
Robin wasn’t concerned.
“It’s from a song.”
“What song?”
“In native folklore.”
Apparently, in the original song, the poet compared a woman’s eyes to a beautiful fish—shiny, graceful, constantly moving.
A lovely metaphor.
Unfortunately, once translated directly into English, it sounded like he was complimenting her resemblance to seafood.
Then came the masterpiece.
When I sleep, I wake up wanting to see you.
I bang the walls with my hands.
I want to run from my home,
push open your front door,
enter your room,
and look at you.
I lowered the paper slowly.
Robin waited expectantly.
“Robin.”
“Yes?”
“You know people get arrested for things like this?”
There was more.
Much more.
But I had seen enough.
We stared at each other.
As his friend, I couldn’t allow this letter to reach another human being.
Especially Gia.
I folded the paper.
“Robin.”
“Yes?”
“We need to postpone today’s operation.”
An idea had formed.
A brilliant idea.
Or so I believed.
During lunch break I rushed to the library.
Straight to the literature section.
I pulled out every poetry book I could find.
..
Keats.
Wordsworth.
Shelley.
Blake.
..
Poets whose work was vastly beyond the comprehension of two eighth-grade boys.
I flipped through pages frantically.
Whenever I found a line containing the word love, I copied it.
Didn’t matter what the poem was about.
Didn’t matter whether the next line contradicted the previous one.
Didn’t matter whether one poet was talking about springtime and another was discussing death.
If it sounded romantic, it went in.
Fifteen minutes later I had assembled what I believed was the greatest love poem in school history.
A literary Frankenstein stitched together from the corpses of English poetry.
Around me lay crumpled sheets of paper—the battlefield of artistic creation.
I looked at my final draft with pride.
Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel.
I had this.
I missed lunch.
But sacrifices must be made for true love.
I returned to class and handed the folded paper to Robin.
“Be careful with this.”
He took it reverently.
“This,” I said, “is your ticket to Gia’s heart.”
Then I added:
“And don’t tell anyone I wrote it.”
For some reason, he didn’t even read it.
He simply folded it and put it away.
The confidence on my face must have convinced him that success was inevitable.
The next afternoon I was returning from lunch when I found Robin waiting near the classroom door.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
He looked nervous.
“What happened?”
He pulled me aside.
“Gia wants to talk to you.”
I froze.
“Why?”
“I gave her the letter.”
“Good.”
“I told her you wrote it.”
Silence.
The kind of silence usually heard before explosions.
A few minutes later I found myself sitting on a bench beneath the peepal tree in the school park.
Gia was there.
Holding the letter.
Open.
Every page.
Every borrowed line.
Every future problem.
She looked at me.
Not angry.
Not happy.
Which somehow felt worse.
“Can you explain this?”
She pointed at a particular line.
Robin and I leaned over from opposite sides trying to read it.
And that’s when I realized something.
I had never actually read the poem.
Not properly.
I had only collected lines.
The words on the page looked unfamiliar.
Like someone else’s work.
Which, technically, they were.
I stared at the line.
She stared at me.
Robin stared at the ground.
I had absolutely no idea what the sentence meant.
To explain it properly, I would have had to conjure the spirits of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake, and probably a university literature professor.
Instead, I improvised....
I said something.
Even today I don’t know what I said.
It sounded intelligent enough.
Or maybe confusing enough.
Sometimes those are the same thing.
Then she pointed to another line.
This time she looked genuinely annoyed.
“Why am I the pale lady standing in a meadow in the middle of the night?”
I looked.
There it was.
A pale lady.
A meadow.
Night.
I had no memory of copying it.
No idea which poem it came from.
No idea why she was there.
No idea what she was doing.
For all I knew, she was haunting the place.
“What exactly am I doing in this meadow?” she asked.
Excellent question.
I wished I knew.
The answer was probably hidden somewhere in the paragraphs before and after the line I had stolen.
Paragraphs I had never bothered reading.
At that moment I realized something.
Robin was standing behind me, very quiet, breathing carefully, avoiding eye contact.
The incoming fire had been redirected entirely toward me.
I had become the official spokesperson for English Romantic Literature.
After several painful minutes, the meeting finally ended.
Gia walked away.
Robin survived.
I survived.
Barely.
And as we sat there in silence afterward, only one thought came to my mind.
We should have gone with Robin’s original cringe love letter.
At least the fish eyes made more sense.
