The One
He looked into her eyes and smiled. He had a tendency to get lost in them. They were blue, big and beautiful. He stared more intently into them, almost if he was trying to look into her soul. He put his index finger and his thumb on the screen and zoomed out, as he sighed deeply. It had been almost three weeks since he had last spoken to her. 15 days. 21, 600 minutes. 12, 96, 000 seconds. That’s 12 million. Okay so more like two weeks, but it felt more like two lifetimes. He sighed deeply again, hoping the old lady next to him on the bus would ask him what was wrong. She didn’t.
He knew it was love. Who cared what his parents said. Who cared what his brothers said. He knew it was love and he knew that he missed her. He opened his phone again and started typing. “I miss you, I really do.” Then he deleted all of it. He had said the exact same words countless times over the past few weeks, in multiple different ways. She probably wouldn’t reply to him this time either. Maybe if he didn’t message her for a few days she’ll miss him. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Maybe this was pernicious, he thought to himself. He didn’t know exactly what the word meant, but he heard the man in the nice suit on TV say that the UN was pernicious with regard to the situation in Syria. It didn’t sound like it meant something good. He didn’t know what Syria was either.
“Off the bus.” He looked up to see this huge man staring down at him. It was the bus driver, and it was the last stop. He had missed his stop 5 minutes ago. Sighing deeply yet again, this time in the hope that the bus driver would ask him what was wrong, he stood up and picked up his bag. The bus driver didn’t seem to care either, so he got off the bus and started the long walk home. It was only a 15 minute walk, but when you’re heartbroken everything seems to be a lot longer and more difficult than it actually is.
Suddenly he remembered that he’d be walking past her house, which made him a little more energetic. He briskly walked along the footpath, making sure to look both ways each time he crossed the road. He looked like a man on a mission, and he sure was. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got to her house, but he knew he was going to do something. Maybe he could stand under her window and recite one of those poems his grandfather was reading to him last night while putting him to sleep. It was by some poet called Pablo Neruda, who came from a country called Chile. He knew it was in America, but not his America. He also knew that this Pablo was not the same one that he saw killing someone on TV in that Narcos show. He wasn’t allowed to watch TV on weekdays, but sometimes he used to hide behind the door and secretly watch in his brother’s room. They had caught him there once, but they promised not to tell mom and dad if he gave them his entire allowance for two weeks. He had to agree, he didn’t have an option. He knew if his parents found out, he wouldn’t get his allowance for a month.
He had a weird feeling in his stomach. It was some weird mix of nervousness and excitement. It was the same way he had felt when he asked her to the dance on the last day of elementary school. He couldn’t believe it was only two weeks ago, the day he turned eleven. The feeling suddenly intensified as he stepped onto her front lawn. His eye twinkled and his lips broke out into a small grin when he noticed the light in her room was on. He quietly sneaked across to her mother’s prized rose garden and pulled one out. He shuddered to think what would happen to him if her mother ever found it. He quickly put that thought to the back of his mind; he was nervous enough as it was.
He picked up a small rock, and threw it at her window. It hit. “Phew!”, he exclaimed loudly, grateful that he hadn’t missed baseball practise today. Her window slowly creaked opened. Now running on adrenaline, he began to recite “Here I love you. In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself. The moon glows like…” “Damn”, he whispered to himself. He had forgotten what the next word was. He was also happy his parents didn’t hear him say “damn”, he didn’t have any money to put into the curse jar. At that very instant he forgot about all his money problems because he saw her beautiful hair and perfectly sized head stick out of the window.
“Hey, who’s there?” Huh. That wasn’t her. Who was this. “Its me, who are you?” he replied, not realising the absurdity of his response. “I’m Arianna, who are you?” He was extremely confused now. “Where’s Emily, the girl who used to stay here?” “Oh, she and her family moved to Europe. My family and I just moved here from New York” He was heartbroken. No wonder she wasn’t replying to his messages. She probably wasn’t even getting them. The weird feeling in his stomach was replaced by the same feeling he had when he got punched in the gut last week during the baseball game. Except that time the batter tripped and rammed his fist into him by mistake. This time it felt like it was done on purpose. “I really liked your poem by the way.” She looked at him and smiled. All at once, he realised how pretty Arianna was. Her eyes had a mischievous twinkle to them, and when she smiled at him he got that weird feeling again, the one that felt good. He was in love.
