Amore Si

ᾦ

“”It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve

as a warning to others”

-Anon.

ᾦ

They don’t use bricks in California.

Anyone who lives here, learns that an earthquake will shake them loose.

So, when my friend remarked that I had made my house of bricks, while his was made of straw, this little pig began to get nervous. The implication that my “house” was sturdier than his, (he, who had been married for thirty-five years), was simply wrong. Somewhere in my head, I already knew that…but I was in firm denial, for the creeping decay that entered my marriage had already become fatal, and its’ final gasp was bound to be painful.

ᾦ

As a child…not a small child…I began to believe that when I looked at something, it became real. What lay outside my vision would disappear and no longer exist.

I’d turn around very rapidly in an attempt to “catch” reality fading, or darkening, or whatever it did when I wasn’t looking. I may have succeeded once or twice, or simply blacked out from turning too fast.

The error of this reasoning slowly sank in, and I resolved to let the world be…and not worry about what was behind.  An early and crude prescience of “Be here now”.

But reality did seem to be an activity dependent on the strength of conviction.

That’s the frustrating thing about it…it doesn’t stay put. Like water in a cardboard box. But I still have that sense of illusory presence…in fact, since you are reading this, there is a slight chance that you might disappear when you are done.

:

Or perhaps…I will.

:

Other more interesting ideas captured my attention:

How will we know when we are… ”grown”? What will the answer to our dreams really be like? Is success recognizable, or does the struggle to get there become all there is? If we “arrive”, will we know it? What is happiness?

Is love really blind? Or do the smitten turn willfully, away from their better judgment? A hundred insoluble questions. My brain was a perpetual motion machine.

We want to believe in forever, and in our dream of true love.

That pesky dream.

We prefer illusion, to the hard-knuckle reality of dealing with a difficult other. It should be obvious that this is where the devil slips in…but how quickly we forget to notice, choose to ignore, tolerate, or openly capitulate.

We might ignore the first lie, knowing that if we don’t, this chance at love will be stillborn. This could be it, after all.

At the second lie we convince ourselves that it was only a mistake, a stumble on the road of romance, a slip…a slide, that can be easily corrected or generously forgiven. The first lie is already history, but the second, although we’ve let it pass, has the sickly sweet scent of precedent.

By the third lie, we are already aware that we are complicit…we’ve committed ourselves, and the choice between allowing the lies, and the end of love, is no longer  a choice at all. If we accept the third lie, we are bound to absorb all those that follow, until one day…the last lie:

“You know…I still love you…………”

ᾦ

When the earthquake came, we had just left the Bay Bridge, and were on the overpass through San Francisco. The freeway began to sway and buck in long undulations. I watched the hard concrete flex like a wet noodle in the shock wave. The traffic stopped dead, and turning in my seat toward downtown, I expected to see the city collapse.

It didn’t.

ᾦ

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”

-John W. Gardner

ᾦ

~ by theoxherd on January 19, 2013.