Sav — Chapter 1
She said she had many secrets, that she didn’t like oversharing, that there were so many things nobody knew about her. He thought he could change her, he though he was special. Even if he truly was, his ideas on himself were not gonna change the fact, that others might differ. She had a public life, he admired that of her, but deep down had fears of the possibility that she would spend more time with her audience than him, given a relationship one day came to exist. When she said she was bisexual, that scared him too. He wasn’t sure whether that was because there were more potential romantic interests for her and the chances of him being chosen diminished as the group of maybes got bigger or because, given again, that a relationship between the two was actualized, she would perhaps be, more doubtful about her love for him. But that of course was, he told himself, his insecurities speaking. She was smart, she was quite possibly the smartest girl he’d ever seen. He wondered for a moment whether she could be smarter than him, but he was too proud about that. He derived his sense of self from intelligence, his identity. He settled on them both being equally sharp, and that levelness was what he always wanted. Although she could be wiser, and that was fine. He wanted to learn from others, he wanted to learn from her. She wrote, and he wanted to write. She was successful at that, and he looked up on her strength, the willpower to keep trying; he was stuck a few steps behind. He would never feel envy for her, love wouldn’t permit it, but it made him slightly insecure about the fact that maybe, maybe writing wasn’t really a thing for him. He thought of how wonderful it would be if he wrote her a letter so beautiful that she couldn’t refuse, but how could he articulate his feelings without altering and degenerating their intent; if only she could read inside him like another one of those books she liked so much! Then there was the issue of: what if he was projecting? Of course he was, or was there any other way of looking out into the world than through the tainted glasses of his conditioning, desires and expectations? Nonetheless he felt he’d never seen another creature of such intricacy, so full of contradiction, of introspection, all at once selfish and yet humble, just like himself! But the similarities had to end somewhere, before it got uncanny, before he saw the vivid image of himself looking back in full horror. For a start, he wasn’t very cautious of his privacy at all, he’d grown up with a lobby for a bedroom, and felt he didn’t believe in secrets. She said she wasn’t confident and while he also felt his written words could lack worth, he separated himself from his work. Besides — and he needed to clarify this because it was important to him — he didn’t share the idea of altering his consciousness through external means or substances, except the occasional beer or two, but he said it never got to that point, except that one time at eighteen. He was willing to debate, given that the separation between one thing and the other wasn’t rationally discernible and a mature discussion could benefit both parties. At the same time, he didn’t want to compromise his views on the world for the sake of love, what he was offering was the honest possibility of reconsideration. His views could be biased and flawed, on that subject or any other, and he wanted to be a better man. Beside her ideas and the mind behind them, he enjoyed her change of looks, her way of dressing, and even more so her gestures, the particularities and expressiveness of her lips and cheeks, how she blinked. He contemplated and played with the idea that one day, they could, perhaps meet.
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