MONO ISSUE 2 - Flipbook - Page 11
EDUCATION
by Edward Lee
I WAS NEVER SURE of your age, somewhat hesitant to ask, raised as I was to never ask
a lady such, though I was no longer a boy – nor did I ever really do what I was told from
the time I was old enough to know the word ‘no’ - when I knew you, yet some way from
being a man in anything other than age. I know now, if I had asked, you would have told
me without hesitation, but I believe, at the time, I felt some fear at how you might react
to the question, though that fear may have been amplified by the constant dread I knew
beneath the will of my father, a will I was forever rebelling against until I was old enough
to leave the unsafe shelter of his roof. Such fear as the one my father invoked in me had
a tendency to bleed into every aspect of my life, a raised voice heard in the distant
capable of tightening my skin and shaking my heart even when it was apparent that the
voice had nothing to do with me, so it makes some sense that whatever fear stilled my
question – though what did I truly have to fear by asking you when whatever reaction
you may have had, it would most certainly not have involved any physical violence – was
swollen beyond all proportion; even now, from time to time, a raised voice or a loud bang
heard at the limit of my hearing can still tremble my hand and threaten to pull me back
into childhood, a waiting for the punishment, deserved or not, to fall upon me.
I am now the age I imagine you were then – can it really be that long, decades gone
while only a handful of years seem to have passed? - when you opened yourself to me,
revealing the world and all I did not know but believed I did, as people of that age do,
only admitting the truth when they are older, as I am now; I can almost feel my cheeks
redden, my breath catch in my chest, as I remember how sure of the world I had been,
the world and my place in - no, above - it, and how the world must have looked at me
with sympathetic humour in its eye, and, perhaps, as I look at the young of today,
blissfully immortal and ignorantly wise as they are, with some small hint of jealousy.
I loved you, in a way, my heart broken by someone my own age and ready to be
mended by someone new, firmly believing then that the only way to heal a heart was to
find someone new to love; I imagine, when I think of it, my love for you leaking through
the cracks that were newly joined but not flush, that, in truth, would never be flush, for,
as I know now, hearts never entirely heal, no matter how much time passes, no matter
how many other people we find to repeat our hopeful ‘I love you’, though, it must be
said, as foolish as believing such a thing was, it was far better than my belief of only a
few years before meeting you – when I was a child in every respect including age and
still living beneath the roof of my father - that I would never know love again after losing
my first love, my heart broken beyond any hope of repair, its many jagged pieces
doomed to decay within my chest, and an anger bubbling beneath it all that this should
have happened to me, another wound inflicted in a lifetime of wounds given to me by my
father’s heavy words and heavier fists.
I loved you, yes, as much as my young heart could, young and wounded and,
unfortunately, selfish as most young hearts seem to be, and, as I have discovered to my
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