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October 27, 2007When in doubt, belt it!said my late, great friend Scott.So I often have the opportunity to remember his wit, love of fun, and ready smile when preening before the mirror. That’s sound advice, but my own personal policy is more aptly framed as: WHEN IN DOUBT, WRITE IT OUTI ran into a former heartbreak of mine, and the painful memories it dredged up cost me a roll of toilet paper tears, and prompted me to ask a friend, “If you think–no, know–you’ve gotten over someone, you don’t think of them, but you happen to see them and it twists like a knife in your gut, do you still love that person? I think yes. But if a certain love is nothing but pain, does pain = love?” Pain, is, of course, what’s left when love turns inward because there’s nowhere else to put it. Also caused me to think back on my various involvements with men. Probably anyone subject to the appellation human being has noticed certain patterns in their relationships over the years. I’ve had my share of happy couplings that ended amicably, but after 35 years of navigating the male/female terrain, I’ve identified quite a few patterns of my own amongst the unhappy attachments. And a popular recurring pattern of mine is loving, or starting to love, a man who I have no idea, nor any reason to believe, is involved with another woman. Someone I thought might make a difference to me. MY FIRST UNEXPECTED HEARTBREAKwas my very first true love, a man I was dating, who drove me all the way from Philadelphia to Newhope to inform me he’d met another woman. Another was a guy ten years younger than I, who discovered after we became lovers, that he’d impregnated another woman in another state during a visit to her. Soon as I heard that, I thought, “It’s over.” And it was. Then there was the guy who impregnated a woman after we’d broken up, who when they broke up many years later, came over to my flat to have sex (at 9:00 in the morning), then thought better of it because, after all, he had a girlfriend across the bay he had somehow neglected to mention. Then there was the famous (in my personal annals) man to whom I wrote a love letter and whose next communication with me was to introduce me to his fiancée. That was followed by the puppy love crush that got crushed, on an old friend I saw in a new light, whom I walked in on at a party spooning with some gal I’d never seen. If he couldn’t see what was happening with me, I don’t know what he was looking at. I just plain walked away from that one.Apart from the usual child-father-mother triumvirate configurations and variations that crop up in the healthiest of people, I wonder why when I have no idea whatever that they are already involved, I seem to seek out men I can’t have, men with other women lurking in a shaded landscape far behind them. Is there a special attracting-then-repulsing pheromone they emit? Come hither—and then go away. The only difference is that now the women are twenty years younger than I am. SOMETIMES MEN MAKE ME THINK,are you completely clueless, or just conveniently clueless? I’m a writer, I think things out by writing them out, I write to everybody, when they’re not with me, letters or emails or postcards. The other pattern is finding men who will not acknowledge nor respond to the writings at all, or the content of those writings, like I’d never bothered to say certain things, a situation creating an unspoken subtext that would better be made blatant and add substance to your relationship instead of an atmosphere of forced mystery. What is he thinking? You know you’re not supposed to ask. At least three instances of that and counting (a nod though to the angel who told me to my face about my love letter, “I am very impressed”). ALEXANDRA, THIS IS GODWill you never learn? Love is NOT in my plan for you. You’re a writer, anyway. It goes with the territory to be ready for rejection. Why do you keep displaying your heart like a pulsing ruby brooch when you know I’m going to come along, tear it right out and leave you to grow a new one? Because, please God, I am subject to the appellation, human being. Where is your famous mercy? THE GOLDILOCKS PARADOXI don’t know if I’ve thought this a million times, or written it as many, but once again I must wonder why for some men I love I am either Not Enough or Too Much, but never Just Right. Goldilocks found the right porridge, the right chair and the right bed, and slept in it peacefully, but in the end lost them all, running away for her life. She did, however, survive.
It’s good to be queen http://www.jvoichdesigns.com/needlepoint_by_samantha_taylor ------------------------------------------------------------ "Short Story"
It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory... copyright Alexandra Jones 2007 |
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