Prompt – I Had Known Him For Years

While at university we were regularly given prompts. We were then told to write for a few minutes, usually about a quarter of an hour, and at the end some of us would read it out. Reading out to a class was the best things about university.

For the following piece I had the simple prompt ‘I had known him for years.’

I Had Known Him For Years

I had known him for years. I had never thought of him in a romantic context. At first it was the age difference, he was five years younger than me, sixteen when we first met. When people saw us together they used to ask if we were a couple – we said no and laughed at the idea.

So what was it that did it? How did we end up together? He wasn’t tall, dark, and handsome. More like plain, light, and average. His hair, though short, never quite seemed under control. His nose had a slight kink in it – a rugby accident. He did dress well – shirt, jacket, jeans, never ripped, and no t-shirts with pointless numbers or suggestive slogans

Okay I’ll admit it. It was the uniform! Something about the black jacket with the gold rings around the sleeve ends is very appealing. We did, after all, get married a few years after he joined the navy. Before you think of me as some uniform crazed slut – it was only him. I wasn’t hanging around at the docks awaiting the ships. Maybe we only got together, or stayed together, because of the uniform.