HOW MY GAP YEAR CHANGED MY LIFE.

Romance of a Lifetime
By Miss Drew

Master Gap Year and I knew each other from way back in the second grade. I was focusing on colouring inside the awkward, diagonal lines of the pyramids when I noticed him first. He was prancing around the classroom singing sweet melodies in words I had never heard before and wore technicolour clothes from what looked like our class dress-up box. I watched him as he whispered into the ears of little boys and girls. Their faces lit up like lightning bolts of electricity and excitement. It was the sight of people alive, young and free at heart. He smiled at me from across the room. His eyes were deep as the ocean, and made me feel as happy as an eight year old can be - like someone had opened the windows and let the warm breeze waft in with the dancing scents of spring and freshly cut grass, and there was a barbeque with all you can eat sausages!


Over the years came the warnings. No one had ever seen the figure or figures, but some said he was a strange man lurking around the neighbourhood looking for his lost puppy, the grim reaper come to take the children away and plucked them from their beds at night as they slept. Others told tales of large dogs and creatures with long claws that lived in wardrobes and behind doors. Through sensationalism, Master Gap mistakenly became the quintessential worst nightmare of parents worldwide, ready to wrench their children out of their cradling arms.

The children stopped seeing him then. Their laughter became less frequent and more like the monotonous churning of machines, soon they forgot about him, and they headed down the “good and righteous” path of ‘higher education’ and ‘maturity.’

Gap Year found me one day during my teens, a weeping mess of a woman in the corner of my room. It had been a few years since he had seen me. I now had a curvy, seductive body that I didn’t know what to do with and I was covered in running mascara, initially applied by an apprentice’s hand. I felt lost and alone. I couldn’t find meaning in anything, not in school, in work, in my friends. My short life was not going to plan. It wasn’t like what I’d seen in the movies, or what I’d read in books and magazines. I didn’t have the perfect body, I wasn’t the smartest or prettiest in school, and I no longer knew a boy, let alone be able to talk to one!

Gap, as I called him, and I became official and were together over the years as I went through the motions and followed the crowd. I went to the parties. I saw the same faces and had the some conversations over again. Gap was unlike any of the boys I had known, he was an older man and so I thought it best to keep him my little secret. He used to tease me in a playful manner, swooping around my head while I laboured through my maths homework. He sympathised that he couldn’t help me with it, but encouraged me with promises of brighter days and greener pastures. I just had to finish my schooling. Then he would take me far, far away.

A short time later, he and I left that place, that era of time or frame of mind. Together we went to exotic lands and magical places I could be myself. For I had a unique mind, which thought just a little bit differently to the others, that struggled to be strong when told how I should be, who I should be. Gap taught me I was an Empress, shiny and new no matter if I waxed my legs or styled my hair. I learnt I was the same person who sat reading make up-less, feet dangling in the cool water of a running stream in the late afternoon sun or the dancing queen of a rural fire covered in dust, singing in tongues. Gap encouraged me to be free, to do and think as I chose.

Gap gave me an explosion of sensory delights, which rocked my world and exploded me into the woman I am today. It was an intense fulfilling rush that touched every nerve in my body and lasted.

Last time I saw him was in South Africa. I stood on the blood red dirt road and was getting ready to thumb a ride, when the heavens opened up on us, I knew it was goodbye. The mighty deep purple sky let out heavy wet drops and I stood there revelling in the moment. Standing in the African summer rain, I said goodbye and erupted into laughter, the kind you only hear from the young and free at heart and I knew life would never be the same.