Seeing you was the only time in my life

that I ever felt the pang,

of what I was gleefully told by my best friend, was jealousy.

For two weeks you burned me up inside and the heat

was intense and stupid and it took me that fortnight to teach me

a lesson, of what is the point of the crippling state of mind

that passes itself off as an emotion;

but is just the pre-curser to slavery.

 

We had dated, indeed continued to do so,

throughout much of the first three of our senior years.

The shortest date on record in Bicester School

as you leant in to kiss me, another pair of jealous eyes in the background.

I could taste the stale tobacco on your young mouth

and I flipped out, the arrogance of being eleven.  But like a drug

I was hooked by you and the jealousy of seeing you dressed

In denim dungarees, your short blonde Wendlebury hair

that has never seemingly gone past the back of your neck as you

walked hand in hand with some guy from the year above us

round the block of the woodwork rooms and steely eyed man

who gave out punishment in the form of metal work, as I

watched through the open windows of the form room, you had someone else…

…I had found something sickly, something damaging in a false emotion.

 

I suffered for two weeks, my diaries show rage, bitterness,

wailing at the unfairness of it all, as young children are apt to do,

but you, the first girl who asked me out, was happy and what right

did I have

to be the class twat when someone more suited to the task

was surely waiting with open arms to baring the responsibility.

I shut it down, not emotion, emotion is truth,

passion is all,

however I tried my best to kill the drug that had taken hold

and I sweated it out. Your happiness became spoiled.

I felt sorry for you in a way that I never would have done

had I remained a stupid, lost and idiotic boy and now almost

thirty years to the day since our last kiss, emotion is good because I can

remember you with fondness

and always have and when we last saw each other in a Leeds pub

you smiled and said I have my friend back, jealousy would

never have allowed that moment.

What right do I have to live or cry, but jealousy is not the driving

force.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015