I know you. You’re sensitive and you hide it because you fear getting stepped on one more time. It seems that when you show a part of yourself that is the least bit vulnerable, someone takes advantage of you, one of them steps on you.

They mistake kindliness for weakness, but you know the difference. You’ve been the brunt of their weakness for years, and strength is something you know a bit about because you had to be strong to keep yourself alive.

You know yourself very well now, and you don’t trust people, you know them too well.

It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain. Damn, there’s nothing like that, is there? I’ve been there and you have too. You’re nodding your head.

And now is as good a time as any to say that she was beautiful. In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette except for when she smoked, when the burning cherry of the cigarette washed her face in pale red light. But even in the dark, I could see her eyes – fierce emeralds. She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavour. And not just beautiful, but hot too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realised the importance of curves, of the thousand times where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.