Some don't know what it feels like to be the one left behind every time.
When he stands by the open window, the curtains blowing, and he bends down to hug you goodbye, you look into his sparkling, bottomless eyes and make him promise to come back the next year, to please remember, you feel you might never see him again. He smiles at your tears and leaves with a quick glance back at you, face spread into that cocky grin you have come to love.
You don't know when he became your world, all that you think about, the centre point of which your thoughts swirl around. It was a gradual thing, you were infatuated with his legend as a child and enchanted by his invincibility when you finally saw him in the flesh. After that, you missed him for 51 weeks at a time, and spent every waking moment yearning for the one perfect time of the year when he remembered you and took you as part of his reckless living.
You love him because for all his worldliness, he's still just a little boy who has strange notions about his own immortality. And he needs you like you need him.
Once you set out to sail on the ship of dreams and stars, seeing faraway lands nobody travel and colourful seas nobody would dare to swim in, you can never return back home with the same contentment for life.
The wait is one of agony because no matter how much you love him, you cant trust his sense of time. He may not ever come back to you, thinking a decade but a day, or a century a week. You live off the memories you have saved, turning them over in your mind until you are sick of your own thoughts.
It's an all consuming task, being the one who waits.
You're 16, on the cusp of adulthood, afraid the one thing you want the most in life will not want to stay once you're old. Worry churns in your stomach, you become paranoid, obsessive, a pain for everyone else to be around.
Your father tells you to stop wasting precious years waiting. He practically pushes you into the arms of what he considers to be 'suitable people to mix with'. But your mother sticks up for you. During those long, cold winter nights, the window has to be shut and your mother is there, kissing your cheek and singing you to sleep like you're a baby again.
You try to put him out of your mind. It's been more than two years already.
And just when you begin to try accepting he won't return...
He comes back to you, finally grown taller, with nothing except a huge, happy smile and laughing, bottomless eyes. He raps on your window and you hear those short blissful knocks, and you run over and you cling to him and the world is spinning because this time, he's here to stay.
Some don't know what it feels like to be the one left behind every time.
But the wait is always worth it.
