Young love and how complicated it was
I hope you’ll humour me, for this is merely the reflection of an old woman—one of those solitary thoughts that emerge unbidden as the years pile up. It is a reflection and confession of a mistake in younger days. It was the 1980s when my father’s work took our family overseas. There, I was deposited into an institution that called itself the American International School. Even now, I’m not entirely sure what it meant by that—was it an American school, or was it truly international? Perhaps it was both, or perhaps it was neither. The students had arranged themselves into clusters, the boundaries marked firmly by their nationalities. American-accented English filled the corridors, mingling with European tongues I’d never encountered before. There were Japanese students as well, but they were usually from other years, and our paths seldom crossed. Even within my own grade, a fellow Japanese student existed, though they pursued a different set of subjects, ensuring ou...