One Dwarlf Tale

(This one section of an unfinished autobiography) 

You could fall in love in such tender ages this I realized when I stepped into first grade. Those feelings might have been merely infatuations. I was not sure. Nothing is so certain with emotions especially that of a child.

I could always write "C-H-A-I-R" or "U-M-B-R-E-L-L-A" when our teacher instructed us to identify things on the board. That was how Julie chose a seat beside me. She was like a leech poring into all the answers I have got on my paper while I was always ever willing to share them. She was there with her angelic face looking perpetually it seemed at my paper. In such closeness, I could study the gentle features of her face, the wide-eyed girl who also happened to be a neighbor of ours although their house was far enough that she was not with the regular kids I play with every afternoon.

Julie had a face of dolls my cousins used to play and she wore dresses like those dolls wore. With flowers and sunbeams in them embroidered like badges. Her hair was always prim and her shoes shiny. When rainy seasons came, she was the only child who carried to school an umbrella made for kids while we carry the larger ones, whose length were nearly our heights, making us looked laughable and tragic it seems.

Even in the gardening activities, I would be the one toiling for her that it felt good to be so needed while she enjoyed being so dependent. At that age, the littlest of vocabulary in our minds never allowed us much conversation that what I did was merely stare at her face and wonder how it attracts my attention so much. In the afternoon, I would go home ahead so that I could again examine her face while she walked past Hadja Saniya’s house.

One day she shook the entire class as she narrated to us, while we were playing in the fields, how she had a dwarf friend that she had put in the bottle. I inquired so earnestly if the dwarf was still there and she said that in fact she had spoken to one of them in the morning.

We all grouped around her for dwarf stories and she would tell them with so much energy that she had sweated sometimes.

From then on, she was so full of dwarf stories that my classmates proceeded to disregard her—- thinking she’s just full of empty tales.

Perhaps, bandwagons were a fact of life even in those tender ages I also started to sway away from her—- what with all those dwarfs.

She then became a little bitter with us and became often in argument when she was chided about the dwarfs. Until one day one of the dwarfs died—- as she had narrated one early morning in our class—- and it seemed that she was so affected by that happenstance that she never spoke again about them dwarlves and became all the more introspective and isolated.

In the second grade, she had changed classes but I continued to examine her face whenever she was around. As she grew older, the dresses she wore disappeared and started to wear jeans and t-shirts, and before we knew it, she had developed lesbian tendencies and became silent.