Short story part one

Suffocated by the semi-light I am choking, wrteched with the sicknes you unwittingly burdened upon me. I had managed to ignore you for four whole years (sixteen in fact, but four is three-quarters less crazy). I had told myself with your Financial Times that you, (comme les autres) were a Tory, arrogant and vain, that one pount for thirty odd sheets of not-quite-orange-not-quite-salmon-coloured broadsheet was cheap, considering how intellectual it made you appear.

It was me, the arrogant one, your modern day Lizzie Bennett, maybe too naive to understand you as you deserve to be understood. I didn't kow that you too had come from the same type of "middle class with social principles" background as I, two red fish amongst our habitual sea of blue. I was rapidly joining the corner of the world you had salvaged for yourself, stacked with books and language, and oh, the doses of sanity that we were offered after we became too different from everyone else for them to be comfortable.

I soared with pride and jealousy as you had the courage and the wisdom to do the things I wanted to do, what my subconscious was kicking me to do but what other people's concious selves stopped me from doing (and if I'm honest, my own youth and stupidity). I collected the trivial pieces of you as pieces of ruby buried treasure, twenty thousand leagues under the sea. My awkward sixteen year old self couldn't believe her own bad fortune when she saw you for the first time (or so I thought, was it?) out of school at the independent cinema, a screening of "Dieu est grand, mais je suis petite". Apt.

I was wearing a top (sale) from River Island which makes my eyes go very green (and consequently, very weird), ill-fitting jeans (Warehouse, sale), a coat, my first proper Winter coat for adulthood, from Hobbs, well-loved but purchased in a hurry as appropriate for my uncle's funeral, two months before. My hair, pigtails, the most flattering style that night as my father (accompayning me, the ultimate accessory!) had forgotten to pick me up after school, in the heaviest rainfall of the year.

We entered the bar, you were standing, leaning, I should say against the bar, trademark pose. You had in your hands a half pint, underage, sipping it slowly, maybe trying to finish it before your teachers' arrival, maybe not. I don't know. Whatever, you had, ut in the meantime before they arrived I stood, trying to engage in conversation with my father while I felt you listening behind me and wondering if the roles shouldn't have ben typically reversed. (They should have, but that's another story.) And yes, you did see me doing my homework in the cinema. And yes, it was French. Grammar, to be precise, ready for the double period the following day, last thing on a Friday. You had Spanish next door.