Two decades. Perhaps a little more.
That is how long it has been since I last laid eyes on you. And yet, when my subconscious reached into the forgotten recesses of my memory and summoned you into a dream, I recognised you instantly.
How peculiar, the things time chooses to bury. And stranger still, the things it refuses to let die.
I was in the sixth grade when I changed schools. Again. Barely a year after I had found my footing at St. Britto’s, I was uprooted and thrust into a world for which neither my upbringing nor my imagination had prepared me.
A senator’s son here. A business tycoon’s daughter there. And then there was me. The son of a struggling, blue-collar, middle-class man, wandering through corridors inhabited by children whose very existence seemed to carry a pedigree.
Everyone seemed so formidably colossal. And I, so spectacularly insignificant.
I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for the bewildering art of belonging somewhere I was so thoroughly convinced I did not.
And then, there was you.
It was between periods. The brief interlude when the last vestiges of classroom discipline dissolve into glorious anarchy. Voices rose, chairs scraped, laughter erupted, and the entropy swelled towards its inevitable crescendo.
And somewhere within that magnificent cacophony, I saw you.
You were a walking contradiction. A peculiar, almost theatrical juxtaposition of order and chaos.
The navy-blue plaid skirt, pressed to perfection. The white-and-pale-blue pinstriped shirt, its collar starched with an almost militant precision.
And yet, you were gloriously dishevelled.
You hadn’t showered that morning. I was certain of it. Perhaps the alarm had betrayed you, or perhaps you’d simply decided the world could endure another twenty minutes without your participation.
Your eyes, though still carrying the faintest glimmer of mischief, were heavy with the remnants of sleep. Your hair had been hastily gathered into something that could generously be described as a ponytail. Two buttons undone. One side of your shirt defiantly untucked. And your skirt, a few scandalous inches above the prescribed length, attracting the withering disapproval of the matronly Mrs. Agnes, who surveyed you from above the rims of her spectacles like a magistrate contemplating a particularly unforgivable crime.
The embodiment of the bad girl.
Or so we were taught to believe.
I cannot remember who caught me looking at you. Only the conversation that followed.
“That’s Danika.”
“Oh. Nice…”
“Her mum’s dead.”
And there it was.
Two words into your introduction, and an entire human being had been reduced to the singular catastrophe that had befallen her.
Not your laughter. Not your peculiarities. Not what made you furious, what made you happy, or what you dreamed of becoming.
Just an absence.
A mother-shaped void, offered to a stranger as though it were the most important thing he ought to know about you.
I was too young to understand the cruelty of that reduction. Too inexperienced with grief to comprehend its weight. I didn’t know what to say, or where to place the sudden discomfort that settled inside me.
But my informant was far from finished.
“Yeah, Mrs. Agnes found a cigarette in her pencil box. Stay away from her. She’s corrupted.”
Corrupted.
God, how that word makes me laugh now.
What an extraordinary accusation to level at a child. As though innocence were a garment that could be permanently soiled by a single transgression. As though virtue were nothing more than the obedient observance of rules written by people who had long forgotten what it meant to be young.
And yet, how effortlessly we wielded such words. How casually we condemned the ones who refused to conform.
I’ve accumulated a few grey hairs in my beard since then. And somewhere along the way, judgment began to surrender its throne to curiosity.
I have become far less interested in what people do, and infinitely more fascinated by why they do it.
But back then, I knew nothing of the worlds people carry within themselves. I knew nothing of the complicated ways in which grief, loneliness, defiance, and longing sometimes masquerade as one another.
All I knew was that you terrified me. But, God, was I enraptured by you.
It was a bewildering combination. A fear so profound that it kept me at a distance, and a fascination so consuming that I could scarcely look away.
For five years, we inhabited the same classrooms, walked the same corridors, lived through the same monotonous rituals of adolescence.
And in all that time, I cannot remember exchanging more than two sentences with you.
I doubt you ever gave me a second glance.
And why would you?
There is something terribly difficult about being seen when you’ve spent your entire existence trying to make yourself smaller.
I was a boy who had already convinced himself that he occupied far too much space in a world to which he contributed far too little. A boy who mistook self-deprecation for humility, invisibility for safety, and silence for the absence of anything worth saying.
That version of me could scarcely summon the courage to meet your gaze, let alone hold it long enough to begin a conversation.
And so, you remained what you had always been. A fascinating stranger.
Then school ended. Life scattered us in its thousand different directions. Years folded into years, and the distance between the people we had been and the people we were becoming grew immeasurable.
But every so often, social media would lift the curtain for the briefest instant, offering me fragments of a life unfolding somewhere beyond my own.
An underwater photograph.
A deep-sea dive into the magnificent, indifferent blue.
A fleeting glimpse of you confronting a ferocious wave, the sea spray exploding around your face as you tried to ride something infinitely larger and more powerful than yourself.
You had balls, (wo)man. I’ll give you that.
There was something almost poetic about it. The girl who had once seemed so determined to defy the little world around her now appearing to throw herself into the vastness of the actual one.
Perhaps that was who you had always been. Or perhaps I was simply stitching together a story from fragments, as we are so inclined to do when we know so little about someone.
But I wonder, what happens when all the noise finally quietens?
When the oceans are still, the adventures are over, and there is no one left to impress, provoke, defy, or disappoint?
For reasons I cannot explain, I imagine you on an ordinary Tuesday evening. Sitting in a slightly rickety wooden chair, its cushion faded and embarrassingly overdue for a wash. A cold beer resting loosely in your hand. Your feet stretched out before you. The last light of the sun spilling across your face as it sinks another unremarkable day into the sea.
No roaring waves. No magnificent adventures. No audience.
Just you, the evening, and whatever thoughts find their way to you when the world stops demanding your participation.
And I wonder what you think about. I wonder whether you are happy.
Smoker. Rebel. Delinquent. Corrupted.
Four little verdicts. Four words that once seemed sufficient to explain an entire person.
Perhaps today you are all of them. Perhaps none. Perhaps you are a thousand magnificent, contradictory things for which we had neither the language nor the imagination when we were children.
I wouldn’t presume to know.
But if the peculiar machinery of fate ever conspires to place us in the same room again, I don’t think I would ask about the cigarette, the rebellion, or the stories that once preceded you.
I think I would simply want to know who you became.
Not the polished version.
Just the truth.
And I would like to believe that I have finally grown into a man capable of hearing it without judgment.
How extraordinary.
The boy who once could not summon the courage to look into your eyes now finds himself wishing for nothing quite so much as the chance to meet them.
