Hook

I'm sorry to stare, but I can't help it. I couldn't explain it to you, because I can't even properly explain it to myself. You look like him, that's all I can say, or, rather, you look like my memory of him, how he looked three or four years ago, when he was your age. Not really like him, maybe a 60% resemblance, but when you looked up, looked straight at me, that's when it hit me. Like being stabbed in the brain, while having those hooks in my heart pulled tight. Why, after all this time, does he still have this hold on me? It's not as if we were even acquaintances, still less anything more, he was just someone who passed by my workplace window. The only time he even said 'hello', on a hot summer day like today, when that window was open, I was too tongue-tied to reply coherently. He'll be 16 now, it's three years, almost exactly, since I last saw him - I can't imagine him as anything other than brain-freezingly gorgeous, as he was for the whole four years that I 'knew' him, but who knows how he's emerged from the puberty he was just entering when I moved on? Not just a boy, but the boy. DBJ.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B