Story-A-Day #40: Through The Ages

THROUGH THE AGES

Avoidance, curiosity, reverence, idealization, longing, comfort…

If I were five I would probably just jump in the snow bank and build myself a fort. After all, no five-year-old boy wants to be around the ickiness of girls. It’s much better to roughhouse and play hard, although there is a curiosity that comes from the fairer sex. I would avoid you mostly, because I do not have the capacity to know you.

If I were ten, I would not have had the nerve to talk to you in the first place. I would have been too terrified by the mysteries of what you represent. At the age of ten, I understand that you are different and that you have a power that I cannot explain. With nothing but a look, you can close my whole world down and that is a scary thing at the age of ten. A scary thing that fills me with a curiosity to understand you better, and a crippling fear that I lack the tools to do so.

If I were fifteen, I would be filled with an excited terror. I would be vibrating with the potential outcomes of what our night was going to become. I probably wouldn’t be thinking about sex, but I would be imagining a million different directions that our experience could lead us in. I would imagine what you were like underneath – your clothes and your cool, collected surface – and I would do it in a reverential way. I would be hoping, with all my might, that your soft lips might brush against mine, a soft kiss between friends.

If I were twenty, I would still have hesitation because you would be my soul mate, the one that I was destined to spend infinite eternities with. You would be my ideal, that unattainable perfection I’d spent a lifetime looking for. I would idealize all the things we could be, while overlooking the simplicity of what we actual were.

If I were twenty-five, I would try to play it cool. I would let you know that you are important, and focus all my attentions on you, but I would know that you could not possibly live up to my unattainably high standards. I would still love you with all the fibres of my being, but I would portray a casual aloofness while I did so. I would no the things I wanted from our relationship, but it would be defined by external sources that create a strange disconnection. You would be the first and last thing I thought of every day, a percolating sense of longing.

If I were thirty, I would wonder how this was all possible. I would marvel at the fact that I am filled with excitement as I walk these wintry streets. I would relish the fact that I am on my way to see you and that nothing else matters in the world. I would take comfort from the fact that we are together and that this is what love is meant to be. You and me.

At the age of thirty-five, I am none of these things and yet, I am also all of them at once. This is how I have grown through the ages and the little pieces fell into place: avoidance, curiosity, reverence, idealization, longing, comfort. It all adds to this moment with you.