Requiem For A Teenage Dream in And The Rest.

Where do you find the words to say goodbye… to somebody you never said hello to, to someone who was never yours to lose? To express the depths of the teenage crush you couldn’t quite outgrow; a piece of the past whose fantasy fingerprints left lasting heart-shaped bruises through the strata of your centre like a stick of seaside rock?

The unravelling threads of his mercurial story became a part of mine; I laced them into the fabric of myself, a diaphanous dream-weave cradle for my fledgling heart… it never quite crumbled into cobwebs the way that it should have; he still stuck to my fingers like the residue of syrup as they aged.

My schoolfriends flitted fickle through frivolous fly-by-night fancies: bare-chested boyband puppets with bumfluff beards and bad 90s hair; floating-flotsam teen dreams, fluttering away on the fading tides of time. The candle I carried was never so capricious, captivation was consummate; instant and intense… I was not yet fourteen, and he was Everything: my dictionary-definition Perfect; a breathtaking basket of flaws.

He was a giftwrapped tragedy; a beautiful, dazzling disaster.

The bittersweet balance of fragility and force, vulnerability and vibrance, talent and torture; he held so much sadness in the holes of his heart; hollowed out in pursuit of holding on to ephemera, to the heady heights of the crest of a wave. His hurt-haunted eyes sighed the spectral echoes of swallowed sorrows, denied by the disarming dimples of a stunning sideways-smile… always so sweetly skewed, as his gaze slid away.

Articulate and eloquent, the cadence of his lightly-lilting whisper was the velvet rippling of water over words; he held time and rhythm in gentle hands, his head inclined shyly in modesty and self-doubt. The almost-effeminate finesse of his face was a mesmerising masterwork of razor cheekbones and delicate jawline, a slightly-upturned nose, an intoxicating elfin smile. A falling angel incarnate, he was the most incredible thing I had ever seen.

I never stopped thinking so.

Time dragged me on a leash through sea-surf waves; I rode the rolling curlicue crowns of a few, and choked on the acrid undertow of more. I suppose I grew up somewhere along that broken line, but he was always an instant collect call to the past. Eighteen years later: a mortgage, a marriage, a lifetime later, I still have every faded photograph on which my fourteen-year-old fingertips traced the edges of what life left of him; every ancient article my childhood hands pulled from the pages of my parents’ Daily Mail.

I rode so many vicarious snakes and ladders with him, it seems beyond comprehension that the story ends here… left behind to be buried with 2016, the year we will remember as the creeping Reaper. I am passing away piecemeal; another part of me gone with him, an ember curled into his sleeping palm as it grew cold.

In death, as in life, he is not mine to mourn. I have no right to my silent tears, cried wide-eyed for the end of an imaginary odyssey; for what he could and would and should have been. My grief is a baseless quicksand fortress, impenetrably self-contained, collapsing inward under the weight of so many years, of so many regrets that could never have been mine to control.

I almost wish I could believe in Heaven.... that flawless face would sit perfectly among angels; it was always too ethereal, too exquisite for this earth.