There must have been a time in your youth or childhood when, starry-eyed, you sighed and plucked words from the air as you got to the next item in your girl-friend’s slumbook: Define love. Then spent the rest of the day waiting for Mr Right?
One of the things that I hated about my mother is, she never said a nice thing about anything at all, unless she was envious. Way back in Grade School and on to Private High, my English teacher would ask me to read to the class stuff I wrote like What I Want To Be When I Am Two and Twenty or If I were a Rich Man, and I would show her my A marks, would even volunteer to read them to her, but before I could get to the fourth or fifth flourishing paragraph, she would turn her back and walk out on me saying, What do you know? I also liked carting home Barbara Cartlands I borrowed from our school lib, but again, she never praised me for being such a book reader, even when she could not even afford to buy them herself. She’s like that old ma in a CCR song who always told her star-struck boy, No no, not talk about someday because someday never comes. Always broke my heart each time.
But about this time, you can bet that I am as old and cronewise as my mother, and like her, I too have tossed most of those silly-girl ideas into the sea, or flung them back to the sky where they properly belong, that little girls may climb them. Not saying you’ll never catch me now singing the sweetest thing I found I found in you, only that, please, enough about crap, let’s talk about something else.
It’s like Ara Mina, bosoms full, gushing in an interview, I never thought I’d be like this! For I believe we all somehow started out pure-hearted, even if not always clear-headed. Then two or three decades and another car later, we find ourselves standing by our bedroom window and reaching for our second pack of cigarettes and looking into the dark and asking, Is this all?
No. It’s not about no longer loving the man of the house and the licensed driver of the new car. Neither is it about meeting someone presumably better than the one who has been sleeping with us in the last ten or fifteen years and is snoring right there arms dangling to the floor. What I’m talking about is this: That life – or love for that matter – can’t possibly be the sum total of two lives or two sorry selves together? Friend Eva R. and her American husband put it this way before they finally split ways and found other loves: He: I cannot be more than what I am! She: I cannot be less than what I am!!!
One afternoon on a walk from a hotel lobby to a resto, otherwise handsome Carlo P. said to me: The thing I don’t like about being married is it fixes you for life. People see you as that and that’s it, it's a straight cut ahead. You’re career is pre-ordained, doomed. I really don’t like married men talking, even if they’re only indirectly implicating their unsuspecting wives, but at any rate, he is partly right: To be stuck married can be a very sorry thing; why indeed be content with being a hero of one’s backyard when one can trip the world fantastic and beat windmills down, too? Besides, if truth be out, it’s not true that it’s a cruel world out there, there are just so many people to love and there’s simply not enough room for everyone, and that’s true for boys more so for girls.
What I am saying is, it’s nice to have one true love a la Juliet even if all we could get is a paltry fuck-up who thought himself your Romeo, and we will never be in want of romances to keep us glued to the old windowsill, but if life shows us another way and we soon find out that it’s a swivel door, someone enters as someone leaves, and pain is as pain goes in, don’t lose heart, be grateful.
Now we have some peace and we can clean up our room. Now we can sort the garbage and dispose of the litter of dogs. Now we can have a new pet or be done forever with pets. Now we have sole final claim to the territory that is our singularly beautiful incomparably terrible life.
