As time goes by

There's a problem with spending a lot of time on your own, you get to think a lot. More specifically you get to think about yourself.

Have you ever wanted something all your life? Something you've wanted for so long that you can't remember when you first wanted it? Or what it was that made you want it, if there was a reason?

I have.

All my life I've wanted a girlfriend.

Now please understand me, I may be in my late seventeenth year, but this is no hormonally induced craving: I can well remember wanting a girlfriend in playgroup; a time where it is traditional to for boys to exclusively kill other boys with imaginary machine guns in the playground; a time when a select group of girls gender bend to play mummies and daddies with the rest of the girls; and for both genders to think of their counterparts as smelly. I didn't have a chance of getting a girlfriend at that time.

And then a couple of years later, the full on chemical warfare of puberty would begin. Hair, height, chests would grow and these two genders would want to play with each other and consider themselves smelly instead. I would see people pair up, hold hands, kisses steadily emigrating from the cheek to the lips (I'm making myself sound like quite the voyeur). Now I'm not the smartest, or the funniest, or the strongest, or the prettiest thing to look at, but I'm not the worst person in the world. When people paired up I was asking myself "Why him and not me?" even when people I didn't know got together. As this theatre would draw to a close, the number of couples would act as a negative radioactivity decay, k more couples than the last unit of time, some negative decays occurring in my circle. Me, slowly drifting behind the masses, and I found a discouraging pattern emerging.

Soon I will be going to university (fingers crossed, touch wood) where if American teen comedies have taught us anything, there will be a lot of booze and sex. I don't know how well this translates here, over the pond, but I don't drink and I don't know how to French kiss so I don't think it matters.

After that marriage, family (fingers crossed, touch wood), old age. You sometimes hear of people that die unmarried, I find that impossible to comprehend. I can't believe that some people can go through life alone. This is partly to do with my belief that you can fall in love with anyone given enough time and effort, yes it's cold and ironically heartless, but it's also neurochemistry. But it's also to do that I have been virtually on my own for fourteen days now and I'm feeling lonely enough to write this, multiply this by decades and it is incomprehensible to imagine how I would feel.

I guess the greatest tragedy is that you get used to being alone.