Pour Me Another One
It was a cool, crisp morning, The bright sunshine bounced off the trees outside her living room window, creating spectacular colors. It was the kind of day that usually made her feel very alive. But she was going through her morning routine in a daze, her head so filled with unanswered questions, that she remained oblivious to the world around her.
She had lost track of him several years ago, and had no idea what had become of him. However, bumping into him in the lobby of the concert hall last evening had now taken her mind to places she had long ago promised herself she would never revisit. But the mind and the heart are interconnected and she now found herself wondering if she had made all the wrong choices? What if, after all, she did have things to regret? What if she did come to hate growing old on her own? What if she would prefer puttering around her garden with an old, familiar man, talking about nothing significant at all?
She was lonely - and loneliness was very familiar to her, but when it came on her like this, after talking with him again, like a wave over her head pulling her under, she didn't know what to do, how to feel, or how to make it go away. Her thoughts were taking her down winding pathways - perhaps she had expected too much and so may simply have been doomed to dissatisfaction. Maybe she had aimed for the enormous and impossible with the cost being a failure to be satisfied with her everyday achievements. She had tried very hard with their relationship to be satisfied with what there was - it was a great deal - a lover and a friend all in one, but it wasn't in her nature to accept being second place, and her nature, wanting more, made him angry and anger made him sad and sorrow made him cold which caused her pain which made her demand more from their relationship. There were times that the two of them actually looked quite unappealing to each other. Still, they had survived for a decade. Longer than many marriages. But their time together had been measured in hours, not days, so ten years hardly amounted to a decade. But it had seemed long enough at the time.
She realized that this was becoming a dangerous day of self-discovery and she was frightened about what she might learn but she needed to uncover the nature of love - the nature of love as it applied to herself. What was truly her own nature of love? Did love even apply to her? Did she ever have it? Did she have it and then lose it? Was there even such a thing, or was it just some comforting, or discomforting, myth, created to entertain, provide a plot, or a little surge of excitement in the midst of day to day survival?
With more reflection, she decided that there was such a thing as love - she recalled its sturdiness, its heat, and the foundation of joy it had built for her each day. But was it all just merely romance? She quickly decided no as she remembered her promise to him "I won't ever forget you", and that now appeared to be the truth. She hadn't forgotten him or their relationship, but the nature of reality was something quite different - she knew that everyone brings part of their own history to happiness and love and all the experiences and events that shape their reality. Two people can spend time together and lay their bodies together with quite different, even conflicting, impressions.
She understood now that the root of their failure was actually a terminal, yet hidden, disrespect for each other - his capacity to somehow be able to take her and his wife into account and her more complicated unwillingness to take his wife into account. She never thought that he was lying when he told her he loved her - he truly meant it - and so, she presumed, he would not be lying to his wife when he talked of love with her either. What secrets had he kept from her? Certainly, he had never told her that he discussed love with his wife - she was only sure he must have. And those were the threads of disrespect that finally ruined them. It was odd now to think of herself as a secret, reduced to merely words that couldn't be said and actions that couldn't be revealed.
She now felt that having been a part of their relationship was simple bad behavior. But she was not a bad woman. Years ago his affections were a mystery to her, so what made her think now that she might be able to unravel them - or that knowing would make some kind of a difference. She had changed her priorities and today would make a pact with herself to stop walking these destructive pathways through her memories.
And so , she made a promise to herself that no matter what happened, if he should call her, or even if she saw him again and heard his stirring and heart-spoken words, she wouldn't go backwards - she would stop this curiosity of hers and stick to her promise to herself, and that would be that, she told herself as she swallowed another rum and coke to dull the pain.....
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