(...........contd) I could not sleep that night. Life was futile. Everytime I closed my eyes those angry, accusing fingers pointed at me, threateningly close to poking my eyes out. So the next day I went to Rosie for advice. If ever there was a person who had a fitting name it was her- she was a rose blooming in spring. On her mid-twenties, she worked at the school library. At times all the fellows had had crushes on her but she was older than ys and sensing that she was unattainable we had all settled for being her friends. And she did treat us as equals, friends not mere pimply-cheeked schoolboys. She folded the book on a bookmarker and listened to me intently as I recounted my plight. "What should I do, Rosie?" I asked. "Bichara, she called you a dog and you are still in "love" with her?" she half-mocked. "Yeah, I think so. Is that bad, Rosie?" She seemed to think so. She explained me the difference between harmones and heart. But she would not tell me what to do. She told me that I had to pick my own poison and sure, I may stumble and fall but I should learn to pick myself up. Nobody but myself could teach me the lessons of life. Rosie was like that- she had all the answers but she wanted us to figure it out by ourselves. Yeah I wanted to find out by myself. But there seemed to be no answer. Life was futile. My puppy love had reduced me to a dog and an insomniac. It was easy for Rosie to dismiss my feelings as lust but she was not the one who stayed up all night, unable to sleep and thousands of plans and schemes running my mind wild. Hers were not my sleepy eyes that searched a crowd for that familiar flicker of heaven. It was not her knees that went weak whenever I saw Sarita. If there were answers I did not have them, if there was a way to get over it I never found it. And now I agonized if my emotions were genuine. (.........later) mG.