There was always at least five feet between us. It was actually a good thing in the preliminary stage. We could lock eyes without the urgent need to look away too soon. The intensity was containable in those five feet.

(speaks very fast) And then my stupid self went around and quickly covered four of those five feet. It is the laws of mitotic cell division god ******. You do not grow four feet in a day. You grow inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter. Ask him about that literature assignment. Shakespeare is responsible for excess glutton in today’s pick up lines. Wait for your friends to dare him to kiss you on a Truth and Dare. Wait for him to want to. Then, tell him, maybe, I like you.

That, in that one foot perimeter, I could see golden flakes in the circles of his eyes when clearly they are brown should have been the first sign that it was a bad idea. Five feet was our perimeter. Five feet was where we stopped. (points to own body) Five feet is where I stop.

For, I will never be anyone else but me. I will never experience, firsthand at least, what it is like to be a lanky six footer who hunches because she doesn't know what to do with her body. Or her exhilaration when she finds the basketball court. I will never experience being the Egyptian boy who has a chemistry counter in his kitchen, who asks his maid to buy him potassium nitrate. I won't know what it is like to be his maid who almost got arrested for asking to buy potassium nitrate (a component of explosives) in Egypt.  I shall never experience courting like the characters in a Jane Austen novel. And how nice it must feel, feeling beautiful.

And I will never ever experience, what it is like to be his girlfriend.