DESIRE.✔

I was in my fifteenth year when I first saw him. He came to my father's house. The winds of Mahina carried him in and swept my sister away.

He came again the following year, and often over the next ten.

I was aware of him, both through my child's eyes, and the growth of my woman's body. 

My need, an aching so intense, that I found it hard to breathe. It crippled my heart, my soul and my body. 

I was told that I was too young to have such yearnings. A love, as mine, was for someone much older and not for an imp like me. It was forbidden, they said. I fought against my family to be with him.  My father sent me away so, I write of him from my memory.

The memory of a young girl, or perhaps a young woman, for I looked upon him as a man, and saw as a woman.

I knew then what it was to desire.

I felt as though I had been touched by the devil. That he had chosen me, in my early stage of womanhood, and surely no other, would share this thing, that I felt grow deep inside of me.

This desire.

I have since learnt otherwise. We all, as humans are, driven by desire, only the object of it is different. With our desire come thoughts of evil; be it greed or perhaps vanity.

None of us is exempt.

All I could do was look at him.

I wasn't sure if it was my child self that sensed it, but I knew there was something more to him; something that connected me to him.

My parents tried everything to turn my attention away. They could not believe, a daughter of theirs, could be taken in by heedless longing.

You might think as they did.

How does it make you feel, to hear that one as young as I, had this desire that needed to be quenched?

Does it make me weak? Do I disgust you? Does the spark within your eyes flare in outrage?  Is it shock you feel, or empathy, because you also, have a need as strong as mine?

A desire.

I feared to speak to him though he always entered the conversations of my parents. Sometimes the debate raged. At others, discussions were spoken in subdued voices. I sensed they all dreaded his superior aura.

But I...

I worshipped him.

Only once in this time did he draw words from my lips. My want for him was clear. I struggled to convince those listening, that I was meant to be with him. No amount of wailing or begging could change their minds. They would not hear of it. My parents' hate was as strong as my desire.

Thereafter, I was forbidden to speak of him.

So I watched him. When he moved, it was with purpose and resolution; sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always commanding. The arrays, which shrouded him, did nothing to hide what I longed to touch. He appeared to me to be redoubtable. He was as an angel.

I looked upon his movements with a hunger I had never felt before. No matter how hard I fought the longing to observe him, I could never take my eyes away.

He knew I watched him.

Oh yes, he knew all right.

He watched me too.

His dark insights would speak in the silence of those times.

I knew that one day, I would belong to him.