This is a silly, childish story, and I'm not even really sure it's one I should tell, but I'm sitting alone at home and I need to unload before I hunker down for the night. So here it is anyway.
Ten years ago, when I was overseas, I met many people who were also living away from home. One of them was a French boy I'll call Pierre, and as my interest in the language was already blooming then, I hung around him a lot and we became fast friends.
We talked incessantly, shared stories and meals and went off exploring places together and because we had so much in common, we got along surprisingly well.
And of course, all that's neither here nor there, but the truth is, even though we were seeing other people, we secretly fell in love; in love in the way that people who will never be together are. We never said it, we didn't have to. We never kissed, or even so much as held hands because back then, it was important to us that we honoured our relationships, and each other.
There are simpler ways to love. Once, for example, he found a way to buy me a ticket to a sold-out concert of an artist we both loved. He presented it to me on my balcony and for moment I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. We had to sit on opposite ends of the stadium at the gig, but he wore a flashing button on his chest so I could see him blinking at me across a sea of heads all night. Another time, we visited a famous cemetery together and drew what we wanted our graves to be like in his notebook.
Things like that made our time together that much more special, because it was easy, limited and innocent and somewhere between all the dreams and secrets and laughter that we shared, Pierre stole a piece of my heart.
French made it into all our conversations of course. I learnt silly phrases and my first set of conjugations from him. I remember lying on my stomach on the floor as he patiently explained, "Je suis, tu es, il est..." and wrote carefully in his curly, boyish hand. "Fais de beaux rĂªves," we would type to each other in conversation at the end of every night. And on my birthday, he bought me two sets of the same books in English and in French so that I could teach myself through translation.
When we finally had to say goodbye, I was heartbroken. We casually air-kissed before he was ferried off to the airport and I laughed cheerfully and waved as the taxi pulled away and then hid myself in my room and cried. Pierre called me from the airport and left a voicemail message saying that he had something to tell me. "I..." he began, and then couldn't continue. We both knew anyway.
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Of course, nothing happened afterwards. Our separate relationships took centrestage once more. We continued to be close friends for a few years, and then not so close friends and now that he's living a completely different life, perhaps not really friends anymore. I met him once, a couple of years ago in Paris, and he shyly pulled me aside into his bedroom and showed me some old letters we'd written each other. He still had the drawings of the graves in his old notebook, but that was all.
I was sad that we drifted apart, but not surprised. After all, as we'd agreed, all we would expect was to enjoy our time together. What more could we want?
I never did use those books to teach myself; it was too hard. But I thought of him, and of French, often and with fondness, and when I finally had the time, money and courage to go for classes, I found myself falling quite easily and breathlessly back into it as if my spirit had been waiting for me to return to the language all along.
And then, one week ago in the move, I found the French version of Dangerous Liaisons that he'd bought for me. I remembered, even before I opened the book, that he'd written a message within, probably friendly enough to be innocuous. I remembered thinking, when I first saw it, that I would probably never learn enough to understand.
But last Saturday, ten years late, I found the page and those words came to me, easy as speaking. You see, he took a tiny piece of my heart, but I suppose he gave me something in return as well.
Only, I don't know if I can tell him this anymore, and so I'm telling you.