Back When

There was a boy I cared for that one day my best friend whom I loved dearly turned against me when we were very young children.

It used to hurt so badly when she and he and whatever posse they were hanging with for the day would go after and target me.

They would hunt me down frequently and repeatedly, for there was only so far that I could escape for seclusion within an enclosed, large playground, and there was little else more interesting in their minds for them to do.

With cackling glee, they would trespass and throw their “sticks and stones” at me – but if they reached for me, I would dodge and run to outpace them.

One day, years later in my late teens, I visited where the boy’s family had meved in order to check up on him.

You know, to see how life had treated him because back then, he had considered himself Apex.

His mother who used to disdain me was happy to see me and welcomed me in to wait for him.

She had been friends with my mother in the past and told me and life had not been easy for her while she was married, so she had divorced her husband and taken over the farm.

She shared with me that the once boy/now young man had been lonely for some time, unable to fit in well and be accepted by high school society.

I thought that perhaps then he would feel comfortable with me again, since we could relate to similar experiences and surely by now he had matured further and “evolved” to reclaim his essentiality as I had been striving to do.

But to my internal panic’s dismay, when he was alone with me, he outright propositioned me lewdly and aggressively.

I backed him down gracefully and got the heck out of there – upset and distraught by the whole encounter.

It was disturbing to me that a boy once sweet before “turning” could have been driven so harshly by societal rejection further down the path of extremes.

Somewhere deep inside me, I had always hoped that he would somehow find his way back to innocence.