(no subject)
After dinner, I dropped by Luc’s place at Batavian for five minutes - seeking the eye of the storm that was about to culminate in a Celtic history exam Thursday morning. Though he hadn’t been expecting me, he was still kind and let me hug him, or better said, squeeze him, for most of those minutes. I wrapped my arms around his chest and leaned against his torso, listened to myself haul in the oxygen, and as his heart thudded beneath my ear, the frenzy of heretofore seeped away.
All these small things I would once have considered omens of hope and love; these days, I know they’re nothing more than friendship, a certain kind of pity and compassion on his part for a girl who still can’t stand steady in this world on her own. But something about that encounter shook me up: the confidence he knew to instil in me again, the spontaneous hug on his part as I went out the door, the smile of self-deprecation as he told me that the world’s only problem is that it thinks too much for its own good. I walked down the stairs as his latest girl, Mieke, came up for dinner with him, and already then I was thinking that if he loves me…if he once loved me...as a friend, a sister…then he loves me as I am.
All these small things I would once have considered omens of hope and love; these days, I know they’re nothing more than friendship, a certain kind of pity and compassion on his part for a girl who still can’t stand steady in this world on her own. But something about that encounter shook me up: the confidence he knew to instil in me again, the spontaneous hug on his part as I went out the door, the smile of self-deprecation as he told me that the world’s only problem is that it thinks too much for its own good. I walked down the stairs as his latest girl, Mieke, came up for dinner with him, and already then I was thinking that if he loves me…if he once loved me...as a friend, a sister…then he loves me as I am.