"O to break loose. All life's grandeur is with a girl in summer."
Robert Lowell
"You become casual about male beauty as you get older. You still notice it - of course you do - but it no longer touches you. At 14, however, a beautiful boy is the promise of everything you never dared hope for. It hits you like hunger, in your stomach, inducing a desire for possession reserved until then for sweets, clothing - and your classmate's perfect ponytail.
Twenty years on, I can still conjure up all those emotions when I replay the morning that I sat cross-legged on a youth-club bench during a family holiday in Lake Como, watching a group of teenage boys play football. It wasn't the fact that he was a foot taller than the others that made him stand out. It was the sleek, adolescent liens of his torso, the harmonious Mediterannean stones of his skin, eyes and hair - and that scallop of white teeth - when he smiled. His skin, tanned and poreless, possessed that particular luminosity which is lost, mattified in adulthood...
We kissed on the hard shoulder of a dual carraige way, all twisted around on his moped, with the petrol tank digging into the small of my back, and there was something so unsophisticated in his manner that I wondered whether it might be his first. Our romance lasted four days: four laughably chaste days spent exchanging nutella-flavoured kisses on the narrow wooden pier stretching out above the lake, and seeing who could hold their breath longest under water. I retain a snapshot of Alessandro resurfacing after a dive, his hair a blue-back fin, shaken impatiently loose in the unconsciously virile way - I have since noticed - that all teenage boys do.
I cried every second of the journey home, played and replayed the same searingly bad Italian pop song that had been our theme tune, until the tape went black with use. I never had anything more than the most infantile conversation with him, never even knew his surname, but I was convinced that I loved him.
Recently, when a friend's daughter lay sobbing in my lap over a 13 year old French cad named Francois, I checked the impulse to laugh, to tell her it was nothing - that she wouldn't even remember him in years to come. It would be a lie."
Celia Walden, "My Summer of Lover" collection of short stories from Harpers Bazaar UK July 2010.
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