Like any kid who is lucky enough to have the world want him in it, he has been taught how to love—a seminar where his dad shows him how to strip aloe vera in two to lay it over spots the sun has shined on for too long, a whole class dedicated to how his mom keeps on telling him stories to sleep even when he’s grown enough to read on his own.
The thing is, even though he had technically attended every lesson, he’d never thought he would need to pay attention to the instructions. So when it’s his turn for show-and-tell to go up to the front of the class and demonstrate how it’s done, he loves as if he's been forced to improvise.
Scene unscripted, role unrehearsed, character unprepared, all he can think about is how she had looked the moment right before, sunburnt by his bedside lamp on the pitch black of the room to showcase smoldered pores and the limestone of her thighs, skin that stands behind the pale line telling apart the stretch of her legs that had tanned over the summer and the one not even the sun had been allowed to kiss.
You can try to keep your plants well fed and end up overwatering them. You can lay under someone else's bedroom lamp and end up bulb-burnt. You can improv love and end up with violence. The lovers always lose at love—who else could lose the game other than the players?—because if practiced love can kiII, amateur love has every chance of leaving them as dust.
And no lesson in the world could have prepared him for that—not for the violence or the dust or the peeling skin or the failed classes—but to run a hand over a place that hasn't ever been even at sun's reach, and know he's going to be stripping aloe vera to soothe the scars he'll leave for time to come, and that he'll be telling unscripted, unrehearsed stories that stretch on and on to avoid reading out their end—(that no one, not even the sun wins).
