Pieter Geeraerts (†02/04/2012)

Vulnerable Age fourteen is vulnerable. But it's also exciting and glistening. But somehow that leaves us vulnerable. When I was fourteen, I met my best friend. It must have been mid-summer (isn't it always?). I had a stronghold on him. We were easygoing. We were inseparable. We were blind to how vulnerable we were. Strangers would see us and comment on how in love we were. In return, we gave them huge laughs followed by rushed explanations that we were just friends. Always, always just friends. We never needed to be more than that. We had other things to fall in love with, like the air we breathed and the ground we ran on. We were too busy to fall in love with each other. But then the year ended and we moved on, mutually drifting apart as even the best of friends do. It wasn't until that sunny autumn before I started to feel that gentle ache in my core. It's faded since then. To this day I'm not sure what that ache was. Was I nostalgic for the endless days of his friendship? Or was I feeling my first real heartache for a love that I never knew I was lucky enough to experience?

Anger Anger washes over me like a flood; soul destroying heart clenching fists tightening, I don’t want it but it is here. I have to write these Angry words down before they escape my lips and, hurt, my friend would remember them, forever, if I speak the foul words, swear words. Then tears start spouting from my eyes falling into a lake that I am drowning in. If I contain my anger my body will be damaged I have to say it. So I scream as loud as I can in my empty house my whole body tense then relief at last. I have expressed the worse feelings, I can relax a bit more; in fact I am exhausted. I pour myself a glass of wine and drop into my armchair hoping that I will know peace again.