I shall cut straight to the heart of it; I’m not one for angsty ranting save for the area of religion.
I am eighteen. She is fifteen. I currently have no prospects for my future - I am unemployed, don’t even have a license, and have only a GED as far as my education goes. I am poor - I live in a mobile home, alone - and can offer her nothing.
I have seduced her once before, a year ago. I shouldn’t have done it, not because of the age distinction - she’s a good deal more mature than I - but because friends of mine ‘interrupted’ us and word got out. She is naturally shy, an introvert much like myself, and she grew to despise me for it.
We’ve just now begun to speak again, and I know that I love her.
I understand that I am young; I also understand that it’s a cliché for the young to say that they’re young. I know very well that she’s much younger yet, and that I took advantage of her at a time in my life when little else mattered to me. And now I desire her more than anything else.
Materially, the only option for me is to move in with my grandmother and grandfather (middle-middle -class) and ask them to teach me to drive. I have no qualm against this or, once I’ve earned my license, finding gainful employment and pursuing my education. I am now at the very center of the proverbial spiral and can only work my way back up from here. Yet I feel as if I lack the motivation to do this without a goal in sight - chiefly, her. To paraphrase the words that so often escape priests during crises of faith, if only she’d give me a sign –
I know that, given time, she could come to love me. I could first befriend her and take her places that she’s never been. But this cannot be if there’s not already a tendency there, in some part of her, some desire for it.
Most of you now know about my ‘nefarious’ past, and my hopes to publish in the near future. And yet it will all be in vain without some reason.
This, I suppose, is a type of nihilism: the nihilism of love.