Love Someone Like You are 8

 Inspired by Love Someone Like You Are 6 by Stephanie Georgopulos.

Love someone like you are 8. Go play in the part of the park that is right in front of his house every summer evening  or cycle right past his house time after time, just to get one glimpse of him, hoping he’ll come out and play with you. Share story books with him, borrow his Hardy Boys and lend him your Enid Blytons.  Bitch about how Nancy Drew Case Files are too grown up for the likes of both of you.

Love someone like you are 8 and make him confess his feelings for you on New Year’s eve in front of his younger brother who happens to be 7 years old. Taunt him all evening till he actually comes out with his childish love for you sharp at 12 at night.

Love someone like you are 9 and one winter night manage sneaking out of a party at the army mess to spend some time together away from the prying eyes of the elders and the other kids, when you ask him all bashfully yet seriously “So why do you love me?”  and he looks back at the bespectacled you with that boyish smile and says something as simple as “I suppose the liking part.” and melts your heart.

Love someone like you are 9 and have a water fight with him in his garden when he sprays water all over you and both of you are laughing and giggling and fighting over whose gonna take the hose from whom not realizing that both of you are dripping wet,  looking like a pair of bedraggled crows until his Father comes and instructs both of you to stop it.

Love someone like you are 9 when you accuse him of winking at the new girl in his school, jealous in your heart of hearts that both of you ain’t in the same school anymore and watch him defend himself saying he can’t believe that you think he did that.

Love someone like you are almost 10 and say Good Bye to him at the train station when he looks into your eyes and at your sad tear streaked face and consoles you saying “Don’t Worry we’ll meet again.” And you never meet him again.

Bump into him at 25 at a bar, where you are sitting with a bored look on your face, sipping a Bloody Mary, smoking a cigarette and thinking of ways and means to get out of the gathering and all of a sudden see that old familiar face, now grown up to be a handsome, dreamy eyed version of the boy you used to love at 8, 9 and 10.  Notice beside him, his fragile,  china doll of a girl friend who screams bohemian chic. Pretend you don’t recognize him and walk past by him, blowing smoke rings in the air, in defiance of all that you will never be.

Dedicated to GK  who was actually and truly the only Childhood Sweetheart I ever had. Because you won't remember any of these incidents. Because the first time we spoke after 18 years was on Skype and you called me by my real name and not my nick name. Because you apparently have no recollection of me now. Hahaha! What fun!