K.C.U.

It’s strange how but a year ago, KC was swimming in the same pool as I was, if but tens of meters away. How life can just take sudden, unexpected turns! Now I just sit on this old, rickety rocker by my bedroom window, feeling seventy years older than I actually am, looking back on the days I could just have come to her—in particular, that day when we were on our company outing together—and asked her if it was possible for us to be photographed in the same frame close and together. Now all I can do is regret my cowardice.

But then, I didn’t have with me my camera during that time, so perhaps it is true that even if I did have the courage, it would have still been pointless.

Then again, she could have had a camera with her, even those high-tech, expensive, megapixel ones that all the fashionable people of the day owns. And KC is definitely one of those cool, trendy, fashionalbe people of the day.

I actually first met her in a guard house. It was before we worked in the same office together, way before we both got our respective degrees, in fact way before we were even receiving any kind of formal education.

I was five and she was four. It was in this semi-semi exclusive subdivision in a city I cannot now name, where my dad had been invited for some 80’s party. Naturally, he brought me, my mom, and my sister with him, arriving at the place a good one hour before the actual start of the affair.

I was idling on the curb on the street of our host’s estate—my mother forbade my dad to let the hosts know we had arrived an hour earlier than expected lest they suspect we were greedy for the free food—when it occurred to me to go play in the subdivision’s guard house.

It looked very inviting. It was built either like a big playhouse, or a small actual house. I’ve long forgotten the color it was painted in, or perhaps I hadn’t bothered to remember, but what made me think back then that it was so good to play in was the way the steel window rails were fastened to the wooden wall.

All my life I had never successfully explained that, but anyway, I went to the guard house, and then, as sure as the firearms KC was pointing at me were loaded the instant of our first meeting, there I saw her, for the first time in my life, the toddler that in 19 years would bloom to a beauty seven-eighths the straight male population of an office I’m not permitted to name would happily drown in a pool for.

But then again, it couldn’t have been her. It could have been any of the preschooler daughters of any of the residents of that semi-semi exclusive place. It happened almost two decades ago, how can I be a hundred percent sure?

© Jay Santos 2004.