Past is my Favorite tense

Adele Aava
4 min readAug 15, 2022
Image from pixels.com

“ The past is always tense, the future perfect.”

Zadie smith

1. Good old days

I’m 22, Just out of university, holding my B.A, started my first job as a music instructor, money coming into my account, cool artistic style, bright future ahead of me, love communicating with students, love being respected by their parents, feeling so grown up and accomplished, and an old school friend from secondary school shows up one day.

“Hello! I’m your new singing stu…” and stands there goggle-eyed for seconds to place me; “God! Adi! it’s you?” and eagerly approaches to hug me, before I say a word, or show a single reaction.

“Oh! Can’t believe it’s you! You, are my teacher! I’m sooo excited!” and squeezes me in her arms so tightly I feel like I’m choking.

“ha! nice to see you Nassy!” And I reproduce the sentence with her secret nickname in my mind: “nice to see you Nasty!”

Nass(t)y is the dumbest, the meanest, most despicable classmate from the all-girls secondary school I went to. It’s a long time I don’t even THINK about school; She, on the other hand, is quite updated and perfectly posted about where everyone from the school is, where they went to college, what profession they have, who they are married to, and starts…

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Adele Aava

Author, translator, singer and voice trainer, serving food for thought and desserts for fun.