Jerome

It’s a sunny spring afternoon and I am sitting in a familiar backyard. It is the backyard belonging to my friend Jerome, or rather his parents. It is the backyard where we swam and had BBQ’s. It is the backyard where I put Jerome to sleep with a shoulder massage. It is where he first kissed me and where I fell in love with him. It wasn’t real love I suppose. I was a wide eyed 18 year old Australian girl on her first trip overseas and he was a charming French man; of course I would think I was in love with him. No, I wasn’t in love with him, but I did love him very much. He made me laugh, he teased me, he rescued me on more than one occasion and we just loved being in each other’s company. We had our favourite tape that we would play whenever we drove somewhere and there was one song that was ours and no one knew it except him and me. It is strange to sit in his backyard and know that I wont see him. I will stay here with his mother and I’m sure we will talk about him and perhaps she will be able to shed some light on why he did it. Maybe it doesn’t matter why. He’s gone and being here is sad because of that. I wish many things – that I hadn’t left it so long before I came back, that I had told him how much he meant to me, that I had known he was unhappy. Perhaps I have come here simply to tell him goodbye.