True story: Madalina

The perks of an in loved 8th grader

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_{Oh, well, hard to look at, but this is me, 15 years ago, on a bench, waiting for my sweetheart.}

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And a long time ago I was 14 years old, 8th grade...

..and in love. Her name was Madalina. Now she has kids, she got smaller and she is as fat as a barrel of tuica ( a local Romanian strong alcoholic beverage ). But this is hardly important now, and I'm only emphasizing it, probably, as a childish revenge for all the pain that she caused to my little, pale, skinny self back then.

I sat with her on the same bench in the 8th grade. I loved her from the 5th grade, obviously. Loved her since I lay eyes on her, with my small and hidden heart through the countless frustrations of the boy who wants to be a man. When we were entwined together as bench mates I imagined pre-Christian love stories, in pagan times, wandering with her on an allegorical realm, where I would have been a sort of a local hero, a merciful leader, a builder of palaces, stories and vertical horizons. I used to follow her fingers holding the pen and the ink stains from the tip of her fingers. I was always imagining that she writes me a letter, a letter in which she harnessed her courage to tell me that she likes me. That in the big break between the classes she was also seeking for me, as I was seeking for her, criss-crossing through the crowds with her blue eyes. And also, like me, she too was able to see in the microscopic world of the dust that dances in the sunrays piercing the hallways of our school, to see the curious geometry of the eyelashes mixing together when one's blinking, to see the face's polymorphism with its mathematical precision. But most certainly she didn't write all those things. And it was all just a figment of my imagination.

In the last days of the 8th grade, summer, before the whole class would have taken the road of different highschools, we skipped a whole day from school and went to take a bath in the river that was passing by in the back of the school. I bathed dressed, in shorts and a t-shirt, as I was shy to take my clothes off. I was thin as a reed. She sat on same flat rocks, near the rived bed. She and other girls. When we got out of the river, all the boys were pretending that they shiver as a reason to tight our so-called muscles in front of the girls, on the red carpet of the species perpetuation. She was twisting her golden strands of hair and moved her foot in the the cold waters, rubbing an underwater stone covered by some Spirogira algae, or how we, Romanians, call it, mot-a-mot translation - "the frog's silk".

I kissed her at the banquet. It was the party for our finale in gymnasium school. We were both drinking some awful chocolate liquor. A cheap, dirty one. She kissed with others too. Rumors says it that she did more than that. I couldn't have cared less. All I cared was the taste of her lips after she sipped from that chocolate liquor.

Madeline, like mescaline, like amphetamine, like heroin, I'm the ruin.