Teenage Love By Khanyisile Sithole

Love. Love is a flame. Love is a flame that grows bigger and bigger the more you glance at them. Love is a flame that increases in scary amounts the more you see them, the more you talk to them, the more you laugh with them. Love - especially true love - can almost never be doused by the measly water foes try to pour on your ever growing flame of borderline infatuation.

This, however, this is not love.

She does not know him (apart from the fact that they have 3 classes together). She does not talk to him (except the occasional hi and how are you). She knows his smile is like a magnet, attracting everyone that is blessed enough to see it, but she does not smile with him. She’s heard the rumors and tales of his laugh - hearty and deep - and how it captivates all who heard it, but she does not laugh with him. Thus, she does not love him.

But dear God was it hard convincing herself she wasn’t.

Often times, she’d catch herself ‘looking at the paintings on the wall’ - the wall he sat next to. She’d chalk up her less than discrete, and probably very long, ‘glances’ at him to being interested at the hedge in the window behind. Though, to be perfectly honest, she would rather be paying attention to a hedge than the class she so desperately wanted to leave.

Her other two classes, shockingly enough, brought her joy. And him being in that class only developed her seemingly irrevocable happiness. In these two classes, there was no excuse as to why she was facing that direction; there was no field, no hedge, no forest in the background that she could use as a justification for looking in his direction.

And yet she still found herself doing so.