In fact, we do not speak. I know that you are watching me. I do not know what passions I stir in you: envy, desire, disgust, or more probably indifference? I believe you are watching me as you might watch a small animal. I attract your gaze, I cannot hold it. And of course you are a person of some standing while I am no one. People of standing do not waste much time contemplating young men who are no one.
I am sixteen and I know perfectly well that to be sixteen is a triumph. More so, perhaps, in time of war. Because I have escaped the war, while those just a little older, those who mocked me, have not escaped, and so are absent.