What count was this, what number? I seem to have lost track, forgotten the etchings of score keeping; the tally marks as to how many times I had been lost staring at this very screen. How many times now could it possibly be that I was this dumbfounded? Five, ten, seventeen? Over the last year or throughout the duration of our friendship, my lifespan?

Surely she wasn’t doing this again; she must be beyond this game by now, mustn’t she? Or at what age do we ever grow up? Is twenty not enough, or must it be twenty-five? Come that turn, should maturity pass again, change like the quick and fleeting breath of the wind? Would then it become thirty? Or might it simply pass on forever, a myth from the best of times destined to remain forever elusive.

Maturity. How could it be any more than a fable? A sniveling and blundering falsehood, a lie made up in the most desperate of attempts to tame human nature. Yes, of course, for where else would one terrified and well into one’s adulthood turn when faced with the inane, innate and incurable spirit of childhood? What could be thought of other than the only memory ever retained from even the feeblest and broken elder’s state of youth: the fib. Only harsher and set to control those very years.

Alas, I digress. This proves nothing more than for myself to be the fool, sucked so easily into the mirth of those who hoodwink. After all, what use is that to me?

Then again, fable or truth, does it really matter? The result never falters, never varies in the slightest. It always comes to my own quiet disbelief.

Non le posso mai dire; how long had that been my silent mantra? While I waged war against myself for letting it come to this yet again.

It wasn’t anything big, not really. Just procrastination. After all, what did that matter if, in the long run, it was completed? But, oh, it pestered me so; that she should be able to dictate my own schedule as well as hers, push off my anxiety unflinchingly to another day. A day where I might yet be sick or have some appointment of importance.

Why did I always let her? And why, after it all, was she still better than me?

For perhaps the hundredth time in my life though, what could I possibly do other than stare at the flickering screen?

This is another of the things I just call fragments, for lack of a better word. Longer than a drabble, shorter than a one-shot. Not much I can do about that there, so why not create a name of my own?

Please forgive my Italian if I've butchered it, I fear I'm still not the greatest at placement sometimes.