Stick people and dreams when you're young

June 27, 2012

Stick people and dreams when you’re young

We filled notebooks with little scribbles and dreams we shared. In them we drew stick people, of a girl in a skirt and a boy with stick-thin legs. They were together in grassy pencilled fields. The boy held a camera and the girl was leaning on a tree, posing. They were in scenes in hospitals, with the boy as a doctor and they were in judicial courts as well with the stick girl wearing an over-sized ink-drawn blazer with the school logo…

He was poetic so he would let her doodle stars and hearts and the occasional flower while he filled the empty spaces with poems, some rhyming, some not. They were all about how they were going to be the best of friends even when they become separated.

It was far too easy to make promises and say words you meant at one moment and never at all in the next. The boy compiled letters from friends for the girl. He made a scrapbook and put pictures, poems and letters inside. He always thought he would be the one to leave her. He was trying to adjust to the thought she had the power to leave him, just like what his parents and grandparents have done.

She took the scrapbook, flipped through it and found herself moved to tears. She didn’t expect that she would be the one to leave. She always thought she would be the one left behind, passing through corridors unseeing, a phantom of what was once and never will be again. She always thought she would get the chance to tell him, she did love him. She wanted to admit she knew she was the one who screwed up. But she didn’t have the time to.

The boy wrote these all down, these instances he knew and some he made up based on what he thought out to have and he wished could have happened. They would be snippets, not at all congruent or concrete poetic moments. Sometimes he just wrote them plainly. He would get a drink and read it again and realize the lines he had written weren’t trash.

He made a long blank verse about how he imagined their last conversation should have been like. She was boarding the plane in ten minutes and she was telling him she loved him, which was only about the true part. She told him in reality that she will always love him as a best friend, the one she held closest to her heart.

She imagined him suddenly calling her to tell her, “Look behind you” and she would. In film-like slow motion, she would turn and she would see him with his half-smile and his beautiful deep eyes. She would hold back a sob and slowly, seeming crippled by the pain of almost losing him, walk towards him and let him envelop her in his arms.

That didn’t happen. As wishes and fantasies go, all the what-ifs rolled and folded and tucked into the highest shelf. Impossible to reach, even with a decent ladder. The kind of dream you dared to be too fantastical because you knew deep inside you don’t even want it to actually come true.

So now she draws on tables. With a dark pencil, she draws leaves and vines and flowers. She draws a stick-figure boy with grass-like pointed hair, a swiggly stethoscope on his line-thin neck. And in a corner, almost left un-etched on the carefully pencilled-in sketch, is a girl who sits there and waits.

He writes poems on notebooks, compiling them and hoping one day he could share it with her again. He types them in emails saved as drafts and never sent. Because the last shred of romanticism in him thinks it far too modern and untouched to send them to her without his scribbles in Japanese leaflets. He writes post-it notes on his thick medical books and tries to draw in stars. Stars always made him think of her.

And so we both dwell in silent misery. Pretending it doesn’t mean anything. That teenage promises were just a part of growing up and are not supposed to be kept, well intact and forming the foreseeable future.

by Guia Galvez

(Source: guiastar)

8:50pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z9qKOyODYNC8

(Notes: 18)