CHOICE

Not a crush. She was too old for it. Not a fancy. Her head worked more than the heart. Not a rescue from loneliness. She had never relied on company outside of herself. Not a brush with worship. She believed worship was for the gods never men or women. But then in her world there had been no leaning towards any idea of manhood of her choice. There had been a little boy through nursery years when their companionship was amusing to authorities at school and home alike. Then the shadow of men who had always been others’choice, men whom she did not bother beyond acquaintance, men she did not see as men. She had watched men who spoke what they never meant, she had learnt to offer quiet laughter to showy men. She had fancied none as her own. There was no one who had had the space to speak anything beyond formal exchange. For once she made a choice of her own. For once she gave space for another to speak beyond . There was none her choice, before him, there had been speculations by those who thought of but who were not thought in return. It ended but not where it had begun, it did not end how it had begun. She had written of love long before she had known any of her own. She had written of love for friends who had lost, she had written of love and loss with the tools of imagination and observation. She had written of men and women she observed with a distant inner eye but never had she written for anyone. She had been someone who had always kept her head to read feeling like thought. But now she wrote of what she had known but what she had been destined to remember as the imagined. She knew she would write off and away what was just imagination.