A Young Lady of Letters
The last time my hand trembled over a love letter to someone was in high school. Pen, paper, spit on a government-approved stamp, and a red postbox all played leading roles. I loved letters: pen-pal letters, newsy letters, and misleading letters to home from, well, anywhere. But my love letter was to Peter, the bad boy of our school year.
Peter was a delicious mix of attentive and elusive. In a conversation with him, his eyes didn't travel around looking for better. The only travelling was from my eyes to my lips - with his own lips ever so slightly parted - and then back to my eyes. He listened. He found me interesting and funny without ever using those words. I left our moments together giddy and somehow changed. I didn't have the language back then for what passed between us, I just knew we had an understanding. But then we'd pass in the corridor later that day and his slight nod of recognition was disjointed from what we'd just shared. A heady and intoxicating cocktail at that age.
But compared to the cooler dudes, I guess Peter was more of a 'bad-boy-lite.' The real renegades rode motorbikes and took turns sucking on smokes outside the school gates. Although, even their 'coolness' is questionable now. What did we see in them? A rabble of sweaty, suspended boys on greasy bikes who'd rock up at 4pm to do what? Watch the squeaky-clean kids leave for the day with bulging book bags and merit marks? Not questions we girls asked back then as we fantasised about riding on the back of one of those sweaty, greasy boys.
My Peter's biggest play was riding his push bike, "look, no hands," on school grounds after hours. During school hours, rebellion was wearing his tie back to front despite being cautioned many (many) times not to do so by student-weary teachers. But these detention-fuelled antics passed for game back then. As did his shirt-collar-length blonde hair, sea-glass-coloured eyes, and lips that hovered between a smile and a caress.
Peter and I made a cute boyfriend and girlfriend couple, though Peter didn't know he was my boyfriend. The mating dance was a girl claimed her boy then walked around the playground declaring to everyone he was "taken." But it was crucial for the boy to understand his taken status, lest he fall into the path and became the prey of an unscrupulous boyfriend-stealer. Thus, my outpourings to him in a love letter.
I struggled to recall the actual words, but oh my, the feeling - an unashamed, unabashed, unguarded gushing of emotion onto the page for someone. My someone. A page adorned with a tidal wave of little hand-drawn green and yellow flowers, then fashioned into a delicate origami bird. Not sure why. Maybe I thought this gave me an edge over the boyfriend-stealers. In hindsight, what edge? These girls weren't inside penning letters, they were outside smoking cigarettes and rubbing up against your man behind the bike shed.
The love letter's envelope was next for our lovemaking, as we screamed the acronym 'SWALK' across the back of it - Sealed With A Loving Kiss. Our version of today’s more illustrative emoji.
Then the anticipation of a reply. Not dissimilar to the pulsing dot dot dot on our mobile phones. A long wait until a response pings onto the screen. Or comes slipped inside a biology textbook, or hidden in a school desk heavy with carved-out initials and obscenities. Sometimes, a girl's long-awaited reply arrived via a trusted friend or was shoved unceremoniously into a PE bag by Lord knows who. Either way, waiting in love and lust is interminable, no matter the conduit.
In the event, Peter never got my letter. One of my siblings found it in my room and ran like a coyote in heat to show mum. I dashed into the bathroom and locked the door, mortified. To this day, I don't know what happened to my youthful yearnings. I never asked, fearing disciplinary action. The rules of engagement were outpourings were restricted to scholastic endeavour and homework. Anything else was an aberration to parents who emigrated to work hard for their children's education.
No matter a blonde boy with sea-glass coloured eyes had opened my eyes to a different type of education altogether. The act of writing to Peter had felt dangerous and daring. A break from the studious tedium that filled my days. Maybe it was a declaration of my own rebellious streak. A response to a letter Peter never received would not have been needed if its purpose was a rite of passage into a world of other possibilities. Again, not language or understanding I would have had then.
In any case, I considered Peter and I broken up a few weeks later when he fell into the clutches of a stringy blonde who wore her school blazer inside out as her blaze of defiance. To me, she didn't seem interesting or funny—a fact I spat into the ear of my best friend with the vehemence of a woman scorned.
I never wrote to Peter about his humiliating betrayal, but the best friend and I repeatedly passed indignant notes to each other dissecting the affair. An eruption of outrage which ended in our convincing ourselves we were better off without boyfriends. Mum would have approved of that decision.
“I hate you, Peter," I stabbed onto the pages of my journal. What sort of boy played with feelings he'd no idea I harboured for him, anyway? Only a bad boy, that’s who. A bad boy whose slightly parted lips I’d never get to feel on mine.
