Small Doses

• Kye Gwyneth Bandrowski, Grade 10, Tuggerah Lakes Secondary College
• Short Story
• 2014

Finalist in the 'The Text Generation 2014' competition

I miss those days, when dusty remnants of the poems we had studied leapt from the university’s abused chalkboard and into the heavy spring air. The days when we had lost one another, in the the literature we consumed as though it were oxygen. I miss the sunlight streaming through the windows, invading our accompanied solitude and watching as the coruscating rays chased one another along the surface of your skin while you read, as they dipped into the valleys of your collarbones and danced along the curves of your shoulders.

God, how I miss that smile your lips fell into as you reached your favourite parts of a book. I miss your tremulous heart beats and trembling hands, and the way your lungs had expanded with each breath you had taken, how they had nudged your ribs and pushed your chest and how each time it rose, it would fall in time with my own as you laid with me in the field where we shared ourselves with one another. I miss reading the notes you had wrote me, enchanting words scrawled upon distressed paper, amidst the lingering haze of smoldering wood. I miss the way you’d wear my shirts, too big for your body, the way they had held onto you like a dependent child to their mother, you were becoming all the same. I miss the dulcet taste of your lips, a kiss dangerously addictive like a drug in small doses and the way you unknowingly made my mind into a labyrinth of uncontrollable thoughts.

But perhaps, what I miss most about those days is the feeling of innocence you gave me, for as we laid disregarding the corrupt world for those moments, the life that awaited in ruins seemed irrelevant. You were where I hid from responsibility, where I relived a wasted childhood with the gratitude I had so lacked in my juvenescence, a time I had spent carelessly, waiting impatiently to experience the maturity I felt I already possessed. I suppose in place of the childhood I had lost, I unintentionally took what was left of yours and for that, dear, I'm sorry. I have been in wonderment of you from the first day I saw you, its hard to believe that same freckled girl who had brought a worn Oscar Wilde novel to the first english lesson we shared together is now married with a baby on the way. Now that life is calm and freedom is free, I hope that you are happy. Time passes slowly now darling, in sombre days and in lonesome nights, I’m lulled to sleep by haunting memories of the girl with hair the colour of the sun bleached cornfields where she had once slept beside me under the stars, they had known our fate all along but had failed to share with us the blunt truth of a misplaced happy ending. One without you my love, the grounded girl with wanderlust ambitions, the best thing I ever lost.