Elaine

• Darcy De Nittis, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2017

Love was as much of a mystery to me as it is to everyone in the world. Love was something that hit me out of the blue one day, and it was for a person I didn’t know I was allowed to love. Not like that anyway.

The first time I felt it I was only young. Perhaps six or seven, only a small girl. I didn’t understand the complexity of the emotions I felt. What’s this feeling? I vividly remember asking myself that, because when I was with this person the feeling got so much stronger. I wanted to feel it more and more.

The feeling was for my best friend at the time. Her name was Elaine. She was so pretty, she was different to all the other kids in my class. She had short hair, she smelt sweet, and she spoke with an ‘exotic’ British accent, which was quite the contrast to my primarily Australian class. Elaine was exquisite to me. A pink gardenia growing from the foul mud.

When she visited my house we would dance to songs we heard too much of from artists that had been played too much.Then when I visited her house we would play games that are designed for more than two, but we made it so that we were all we needed. I believe I loved her. It was an innocent love, one that is shared usually in the media between a small boy and girl. We were so innocent to the mean world around us and oblivious to the judgment. I would steal from her small kisses, and she would take her own from me.

Our love was as sweet as caramel chocolate. But all too inevitably the chocolate was left outside haphazardly, and it melted almost instantaneously before our eyes. One day, Elaine moved away. It was so out of the blue that my heart broke. To me, this was the end, and perhaps it was.

Now it has been five years. Not a peep from my dearest Elaine. I can remember clear as day, the way her mouth would stretch into a smile and how that smile would reach her eyes. I remember the small dark freckle above her lip that her mother and sister would tell her was ugly, but I would yearn for on my own face. I remember how my clothes would always look oversized and crinkled on her smaller frame as she groggily came to in the morning after a sleepover. I remember her. I remember loving her.

She had no idea the depth of what I felt. Neither did I.

We can never return to the days of soft blushes on freckled faces and I feel like that is the great atrocity in this. No matter how we feel, or how strongly we feel it, there is never a way to go back.

To this day I still love her, but I can't go back.

I miss you, Elaine, please remember me.