When I was 16 years old I was prompted to think by a 32 year old stranger, and out of my tender, yet unspoiled mind came ideas and thoughts that surprised me and intrigued him. I was listening, learning, responding intelligently and asking all the correct questions. This I know with a certainty that is so absolute, because I got his attention. The interest he showed in me became the confidence that was missing in my life until then and all the pimply pre-pubescent boys with their barely there facial hair, caught in between adolescence and puberty that my peers showed interest in failed to spark anything in me. I was already burning with opinions that mattered and emotions that was beyond any of them.
I reveled in the interest he clothed me with and I reciprocated. We talked about the weather and religion and books and politics. I sponged in every word he said and he became my Bible. When this respect became attraction I don’t know. But I was undeniably attracted to this stranger, this stranger who taught me to seek, and taught me to question, this stranger who I had never seen. I found in me an intelligence I never knew I was capable of, and in between all this I discovered a power that could ruin a life.
That intellectual affair never ended, it became a dormant part of my secret past. A surreptitious flicker and gone again. In the time he went my growth stagnated, and my mind ceased to explore. I had forgotten the beauty of words strung together in a dance so seductive, I never remembered the pleasure I found in the banter of a counter culturalist, and I had hidden from me what had become my essence.
He is getting married.
Five years later I found my missing whole in an instant message and it was reduced to rust in another. When we talk my mind flashes back and I am 16 again. But a 16 year old whose voice is laced with languor and words supported by a confidence she mastered over the years. He reads the change in my tone and my choice of words. I concur. The evolution is apparent, but it will never be sufficient. “You’re still too young for me,” and just like that it was broken.
Five years back I fell in love, a premature love beyond my years, one that a 16 year old grown up understood
