Abrielle

22nd November

22nd November

I can see it's pointless going any further without writing about Abrielle. I was so madly in love with her for a year when I was seventeen, and she a little younger. She turned up at school one September, out of the blue, and the minute I saw her I knew she was different. Plenty of other girls in the class were pretty, and I'd had my flirtations with quite lot of them, kissing in the dark at the movies, or at discos, or parties, sighing a bit but not really suffering when the relationships came to a natural end. Good teenage fun. From the moment Abrielle arrived at school, everything altered for me. The other lads didn't rate her at all, so there wasn't much competition for her favours. 'Funny-looking' my friend Geoff called her. 'Flat as a pancake' said Marty, the class sexiest pig. 'Silent, too' said Pete, and their attitudes summed up what everyone thought about Abrielle except me. I could see that her thin body, and her strange, widely-spaced yellowy-green eyes in a somewhat flat face were not conventionally pretty, but they made my mouth dry whenever I looked at her, and my heart pounded when I passed close to her and smelled the wonderful fragrance that seemed to float about her hair. Her hair.. even Geoff and Marty and Pete agreed they had never seen anything like it. She wore it long and loose around of its own. Everyone called it black, but that was taking the easy way out. I spent hours staring at it, and there was blues and greens and even reds mixed up in the colour somehow, and a gleam on it as it caught the light. I spent two weeks watching her at the beginning of that term, and then I could bear it no longer. Looking back, I can see that even the way our relationship started was odd. There was no leading up to it, no flirtation, no 'my friend fancies your friend' kind of negotiation that goes on in school romances. We were in the Art Room, clearing up. There was no one else there. She was washing brushes in the sink. I came up behind her and buried my face in her hair. For a moment it felt as though I was drowning in the fragrance and the softness, and I prayed that I would never ever need to come up for air She trembled, and then turned to face me. Have you ever seen dry paper and wood flare up when you drop a lighted match on them? That's what happened to us. To Abrielle and me. Love had set us alight and we caught fire. We crackled and burned and leapt up in blinding flames of scarlet and gold. We were consumed. For six months, everything seems to disappear, and there were just the two of us and our passion in the whole world. And then (like a fire) the love on my part began to flicker a little, and dwindle and die. I'm not making excuses for myself. I know what I did was probably harsher than it need have been, but how was I to know that Abrielle would react as she did? I came to the conclusion that our relationship had to end, and I told her so. It happens all the time, doesn't it? Don't boys and girls split up every day of the week with no harm done?  Abrielle seemed very calm when I told her. The yellow eyes widened. Her face turned quite white. She said a strange thing, one whose meaning I am only now beginning to understand: 'I'm not ready to let you go. Not yet, not ever' Then she turned and left the room and that was the last time anyone saw her alive. No one had an explanation for how she came to fall off the bridge over the rain-swollen river, with nobody seeing her, nor for why she should died when we all knew she was a strong swimmer. One theory was that her hair had become entangled on some underwater obstacle as she fell, and that she was unable to free herself. No one else knew that I had ditched her hours before 'the accident'. No one else knew that Abrielle meant to die. Me and Hamlet. Neither of us guessed that love could be so strong, so unforgiving.