Better to have loved and lost

I remember the day she walked into the classroom. She was new. Pretty much everyone else in the class had come all the way from the first day of the first year of school with me. None of them had ever lived more than about ten minutes walk from the school their entire lives. I was an exception, and there were a few others, but for the most part the class had stayed the same since the first day our mum's had walked us into the room, hands on our shoulders, and that's the way it had been ever since. Just us kids. Just this class. Until she walked in.

She had hair so blonde it shone in the morning sun that streamed through the windows of the grade six classroom. Her eyes were blue, but so pale they were mesmermising, and even her eyelashes were blonde. Her skin so pale and flawless it was as if she was not even real. Her clothes were odd, as she had literally just got into town this very weekend past, and her mother had not even had time to get to the shops to buy the regulation school dress and shoes, so she wore jeans and a blouse, and sneakers. Her name was Natasha, we were told, Natasha Eden. And I was in paradise.

Being only an eleven year old boy, I had no idea what it meant when my heart beat faster. Maybe I was sick. Maybe I was going to deposit my breakfast into my old fashioned desk. Maybe I had eaten a bad packet of Twisties at morning recess. I didn't have any idea. All I knew for sure was this pure angel was walking toward me. Toward my desk. How I had ended up with a desk of my own was a matter of pure executive decision making on the part of the teacher. Anyone and everyone I had been put next to, I had begun to talk to all day. From the moment we arrived in the morning, until the last bell rang at 3.30 in the afternoon, I would talk. And my mouth had got me moved, finally to a desk of exile. But some would argue (obviously not I) that this was fate. I was supposed to have the only desk in the room with a spare place, so she could sit next to me.

As we had the same desks every day, I sat next to this angel every day. Yes, of course, as an eleven year old boy, I copped a hell of a lot of flak for being the only boy in grade six who sat next to a girl, but I am pretty sure it was all motivated by jealousy. She was simply the most perfect creature I had ever laid my eyes upon. Which would have been a massive problem, had I even suspected I was completely besotted with her. But I didn't, because I was a dumb kid with nary an ounce of hormone in my whole entire body to start a fire with. So instead, we became friends.

My inability to sit next to another human being in a quiet room and not talk to them became an ally of the greatest value. I won her trust, I earned her friendship, I made her laugh, I took it upon myself to be an ambassador to our new arrival and show her the ins and outs of the complex public school system in the suburbs of the mid 1980s. And she was grateful, I think. She eventually made friends with the rest of the class, with the other girls, and just melded into the general melting pot of pre-pubescent school life that we had all been a part of since day one. But we had something. That year, we sat together every day.

Then, as the end of the year approached, I received a shock. Just as she had come, she was leaving. I was never quite sure what it was her father did for a living, but whatever it was, she was leaving again as it was taking him, and the rest of her family, to some new city in some other part of the world. There was so much I should have said to her, so much I wanted to let her know, a strength of emotion that I couldn't quite express in words, because I had no point of reference by which to navigate. No way to interpret the sense of loss I felt when I knew she would never again be sitting next to me in that fifty year old wood and steel desk in that prefab chipboard classroom.

The last day she was to be there, I made an effort to make her laugh, I tried my best to make her smile, I didn't even get told off by the teacher for chatting to her the whole day. Then it was time for her to go. It was time for us all to go, it was the end of school for the year, and the day was long, and hot. We were all going off to start something new. Next year we would all go to high school. For some reason, I had been kissed by a girl at camp, which wasn't her, as she wasn't there. And any chance we had to be alone was interrupted for some reason or another. It was on the last day I took her aside, and told her what I needed to tell her. I took all the emotion I had pent up in my awkward young body and I made it quite clear to her what she meant to me, and how I felt. How much of a loss it would be to know I would probably never see her again.

I walked her to the gate, we were alone. I stopped as we reached the gate, her mum's Volvo just waiting outside the fence.

"Natasha" I said, and she stopped and looked at me

"Hmm?" she hummed, looking into my eyes with those blue white rays

"Bye. I'll miss you"