The Promise We Couldn't Keep

Prologue

TPWCK:
PROLOGUE

............

I always thought that love and sex were overrated. Even back when I was a kid, my friends and their friends and the friends of their friends talked about love this and sex that. Most of us were still early into our fourteen then but they were grossly enamored with either, most times both, to the point of thinking one existed with the other. That was dumb, but hey, so was everyone. Especially kids around my age then.

Everyone knew and understood that none of us had experienced either sex or love, and that the few that had were unfortunate and fortunate respectively.

Still, these talks made me feel like an outcast because I never really got into the idea of either as much as they did. As much as everybody did. The people around me talked about either as if it were as normal as eating breakfast, but then that made me someone who never thought of having breakfast. That made me someone who could do without breakfast while everyone around me enjoyed breakfast every day. In a way, that isolated me from the world.

I was different. Everyone was there, and I could reach out to them with a single stretch of a hand, yet this difference put a barrier between me and those that were not me. They didn't become distant, not in a physical way anyway, nor socially because I could still talk to them all and pretend I fit in. It was more as if the world and consequently everyone in it were on the other side of a mirror-or maybe it was I, or my soul, who was on that other side-and I could reach them and touch them physically but my soul could never. It could only touch the surface of the mirror, the barrier, but never the other side. Never everyone.

Just one unspoken difference but it already caused a huge enough rift that I could never hope to sew between me and the world.

I wished people stopped and thought for a moment that love and sex weren't what they made both out to be. That they stopped talking about these as if the two were everything there was in the world when it wasn't. My time was better spent playing volleyball rather than talking about those kinds of intimacy with another person.

My years were spent like that. Me on this lonely side of the mirror, alone with all my thoughts because every time I tried to make other people understand, when I tried to put these feelings into words for my friends, none of them could understand. They would just joke that I should get laid or that I just hadn't found the right person. I wished everything were that simple. Fourteen-year-old me wished things to be much simpler for my young mind to understand. As simple as one plus one equals two, no questions asked.

Just when I started to accept that my life would be lived alone on the other side, I met him. It was in the middle of seventh grade, my shirt clung to my sweat-soaked skin like a second skin, and my breath burning and in short bursts. I chugged the water down my throat that felt drier than the Sahara could ever be, while ignoring the way my heart was pounding on my ears and the bottom of my throat just below my Adam's apple. I'd gotten used to this feeling already when the practice got intense, and that was almost every day.

When I turned my gaze to a side, there he was, just outside the painted line of the quadrangle, in a gray sleeveless shirt and shorts with light blue arm sleeves covering his two arms to his armpits. He was talking to Rinia, the SSC President, while he was warming up. Or maybe it was Rinia who was talking to him since he barely moved his lips and would always respond with either a shake or a nod. Those lips though, full and red. I wondered if they felt as soft as they looked. Or were they as hard as the muscles that bulged on the fabric that hid his skin? His badminton racket lay on the ground beside him as he stretched his legs. He was bigger than the kids our age, although not as big as I was, his shoulders broad and firm, arms strong and meaty, feet long and lithe, and a face that could pass for a magazine cover.

Wow, I was actually checking out a dude. But did it matter that he was a man? No. No, he made me feel something, and that was the only important thing here. Finally, I could relate to everyone, even if this sudden attraction made me gay. Whatever. No one would know if I hid it well anyway. Plus, I was tired of being alone.

I just knew that he was unlike everyone on the other side. I knew, somehow, that should I reach out to him, I could actually touch him, connect with him. So I did. I came to him and introduced myself but when I tried to reach out to him, he flinched.

For a second, I thought I was just making it up, but when Rinia asked if he were okay, I knew it happened. He was scared . . . of me.

"I'm okay," he said to her and forced a smile at me.

Anxiety ate up my insides. It was as if I saw a shooting star when I wasn't expecting one, but before I could close my eyes and pray, it was already gone. The door that lead to the other side of the mirror closed before I could even take a step forward. The moment had come to pass, and I feared I might never experience it again in this lifetime.

So when I turned my back on them, when Rinia said her goodbye to him and that they'd meet during lunch, I made a silent promise to myself that I was going to improve my grades and make sure I got into the first section next academic year. I was going to be classmates with them both, and I would not give up on this fragile, little feeling because after years and years of carrying this loneliness, I finally found someone my soul could reach.

I promised myself, and I was going to keep it.

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