When you are 14, everything sucks. Every thing sucks. What sucks is that you think you are on your own when hormones rise to their peaks and schoolwork makes you sleep less. You start to battle your parents. You enter a barkada which you believe you aren’t even a part of. You are bombarded with all this uncertainty brought about by adolescence—the kind of uncertainty that you have to face on your own because in your mind nobody understands you. In truth, everybody knows what you are going through. They even have brochures on it. You want to try new things with your own age group. The funny thing is that all these friends of yours are as uncertain about life as you are.
He was half a year older than me. I was at the top of the class and he was at rock-bottom. He played excessive DotA. Fooled around. Flirted around. He was so mediocre. Then, he chatted me up in Yahoo messenger. His messages were banal since they usually involved incomprehensible one-worders like “hahaha taba”. I was intrigued. He commented on my angst-filled status messages. I bet he didn’t even understand a word of it. He started to court me with roses whose stems were at least a foot and a half long. He escorted me from the high school gate to our classroom. And before you knew it, I fell into the hormonal abyss. Imagine falling into a sinkhole with the force of gravity accelerated by a thousand times.
I didn’t know anything about relationships but I knew much about tradition. “Say ‘yes’ to him”, said my equally-confused group of 14-year-olds. So, I did. Afterwards, it was like Katy Perry and her teenage dream. No inhibitions. We held hands under the trees of the park-like area in our high school. We exchanged cheesy lines that usually came from modern films. I grew enticed by this illusion and the thought of him sharing that very illusion with another was mortifying—at least, I got that notion from some anime. I fell into a jealous rage. We broke up. I cried for days and days. He jumped into the arms of another girl. I merely look at him in complete hatred. He did the same tactic with her: wooed her in the pathetic Yahoo messenger parameter and used the same banal one-worders.
He was still mediocre. He still flirted around. He still fooled around. He still played excessive DotA—which was quite obsolete by then. I was now at the tenth of the class and he was still at rock-bottom. What a loser. What a laugh.
When you are 14, everything sucks. You are uncertain about almost everything in the world. When you do become certain, that isolated, nobody-understands-me life is good as gone and you get a hangover after waking up from your teenage dream.
I laughed at him because I thought that he was pathetic. I laughed until I cried. My similarly-hormonal friends mocked him and so did I. After all the laughter, I decided to reflect. But what happened between us anyway? Was there any profundity amidst the pathetically limited courtship ritual? I used to think there was. Was the anime and modern film-mimicry a mere reflection of the curious child in me? I thought that it was more than that. Then I laughed at my superficiality. For the first time, I was sure that I was being a superficial asshole.
As of this writing, I am 17. I was 16 once and 15 before that. But I remember 14. I laugh at my 14-year-old self. So gullible. So immature. So 14.
-Quebec, Ann
--This comes from my English 12 Reflection Paper--
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