|
01.
Sid All entries © Nin |
|
|
|
Online postings
|
Online posting,
explanation of a picture Footnotes:
|
Oh I wouldn't dare to make things up. Sid is a person, not anything I merely populate instant private reveries with; the last time I heard about him he was around 30, about 5' 11", slim by any standard, brownish blond, blue eyes, and usually wore black. He used to go to his office on foot - I forgot to say he's British, but a perverted one, whose passion wasn't directed towards horses; people said he sort of disclaimed every worldly possession. He was at the time a junior partner of a law firm owned and dominated by a fortyish flapjaw run by a big mouth and a big lexicon and an obese ego and a thin wisdom. Some said they got along very well on mutual symbiosis - Sid was quiet, the boss was loud; Sid was the brain, the boss was the show of it. Sid was cynical, the boss had no tool to understand ironies.The boss was, as a matter of course, rich; Sid didn't own a farthing. In the evening he got off work into a nearby pub and drank rather beyond anybody's treshold - strangely he never got drunk. Then around midnight the bartender would have told him it's time to go to bed, and Sid went into the chilling damp air straight to his home address - which was a small room in the basement, where he could hear the footsteps on the worn pavement; no heater even in the most freezing winter dawn. Everyone said he had squandered his life in Nothing. He wasn't career-oriented, family-oriented, or any other orientation for that matter; he wasn't even religious although it was sort of in vogue. Sometimes when the night got too cold Sid thought a bit of what people had said and occasionally he basically agreed with them. Those nights he usually fell asleep near daybreak, his pillow wet with tears. But he wasn't sorry for himself or anything mushy, they said; he only resented the absence of something that he could cling on. Then one day in court he had to work for a defendant named Charles Darnay, a French teacher, that the prosecutor accused of some murky political conspiracyism against Britain. It went well, for him; until an incriminating witness was called to stand and she fainted - the whole case was only built around the witness' testimony, and now she saw that the man communicating with some suspicious French agents could have been someone else: Darnay looked so much like his own attorney, literally (i.e. 30, brownish blond, 5' 11", and so on). As this Ms. Lucy Manette - another French - fell to the floor, Sid fell in love there and then - although he didn't really care that he did. It only added to his bad manners. One fine morning, as fine as the English weather could permit, the teacher and the lady, former client and the opponent's witness of Sid's, got married. In a year they got a daughter. Afterwards, Darnay went home to France, and didn't get back to London - he was arrested for tax stuff and even an ancient murder which was committed when he was a little boy, by his uncles who had escaped penalties at the time. Now everyone was told that his real name was Evremonde, a descendant of a long list of noblepersons; D'Aulnais, his mother's maiden name, was what he took to England among his baggage to forget what he had to, and upon embarking at the English soil he anglicized it to Darnay. His father in-law tried in vain to got him out of jail. The verdict was not just guilty, but also death. Sid happened to be in France after Darnay was jailed. After his business was done, he, too, didn't get back to London. He assembled the local thugs and Parisian underground criminals that he knew, to gain access to the prison where Darnay was to meet execution. Through bribery and threats, he made his way to the cell. There, he chloroformed Darnay and had him carried out of jail, out of France - he took the man's place, of which no one but the guard knew, because their looks were so similar. So when Darnay galloped to freedom, Sid knelt at the guillotine - and only then he thought his life wasn't in vain. He was satisfied, feeling that he had given a little girl back her father - just because he had been loving the mother all the while. Oh, yes, a rather cheap melodrama, indeed! But Charles Dickens wrote it, not I. Just why, nobody lived to say, but that was one of his lousiest books, A Tale of The Two Cities (London and Paris). The background was the 1789 French Revolution. That old. Exactly. I read a condensed translation when I was a kid. When Sid fell for Lucy who fell on the floor, I fell for him. In High School I read the original novel in English, which was even worse than the translation, but what the heck. I still loved him. Though I didn't tell anyone about it, not even when I was around ten or eleven when I fantazised a lot about being "Mrs. Sidney Carton" - back then I still cared about such things as being seen too kooky to quarrel with. Since then, I've had things approaching crushes on scores of fictional characters, from the likely, such as Rudolf Rasendyll (Anthony Hope's cavalier in The Prisoner of Zenda), to the improbable, like Gabriel Oak (Thomas Hardy's shepherd in Far From the Madding Crowd). I also fell for a few of those who once had been among the living, like buccaneer/knight/explorer/writer/chemist Sir Walter Raleigh (during Elizabeth I's reign of England), and lawyer Tribonianus (serving Byzantine Emperor Justinian). Among my childhood anxieties was the fact that I got equally swayed toward swordsmen/gunsmen and scholar and farmers, while no one in the classical tale-weaving business seemed to have invented one who was all three, except Robinson Crusoe, and I don't like Robinson Crusoe. Yet, all through that, I still love Sidney Carton, even as his name had become too far away from my gamut of taste, and I wish he adopted another name, like, Estevez. What I love is not the character of the novel, but a man like Sid. His only blemish is he couldn't play electric guitars, and his only bad kind of perversion is that he lived in England yet didn't care a straw about the Premier League football, but, hey, you can't have everything at once. I am quite convinced that I am not made for men who have sunshine and chirping birds and worldly success in their command; but I don't think I sway towards their opposite either. It is hard to explain - all I can say is Sid. A man who might have failed but never been a loser; one whose mind might have strayed into Nothing but the brain ticks; a disregard towards the financial side of life but never got reduced to dependency upon anyone else; a man who might be unsure of what he was there for but didn't need anybody else's help to find it out. A man who made his vital decisions in a blink and carried them out; who kept his words and loyal to the ones he loved; who never calculated and wasn't seeking approval from anyone else but himself. A man who might not care about himself, but he does about at least someone else. A man who might be not so strong, but definitely is one with guts; who can and is willing to give himself to someone to lean on. Maybe once I dreamed of heroes who slayed a platoon of bad guys in one slash, like every other girl on this planet. But I had abandoned this sort of imagery a long time ago. I always think it is enough if a man is a little tougher than I am, so I can ask for his help if I need it; healthier than I am, so I can lean on him when I am sick; more patience, so he won't mind my temper; a little bit smarter, so he always understands whatever I say; equally holding on to what he believes in, and is a master of his own game, whatever it is -- so I can respect him. I want to be there in his cold little basement cave - I'm almost certain the address is where I do belong. If he is somewhere out there I really pray hard that I would find him. After all, this is just a small dose of insignificant miracle I am asking for - I'm not aiming at Brad Pitt, for God's sake, or any other export material from Missouri.
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
Biographies Of Never
May 29, 2000 |
After it has been said for maybe sixteenth time now, I begin to think about it. "You and he have so much in common," Z's mom said, one more time, today. I've been rather slow this afternoon, so only after I sent my reply to her email which among others also contained "No, no, no, Mrs. X. You are definitely wrong. In fact I think the truth lies in the exact opposite direction. I and your son have too many differences -" I started to think that I'd better think it over. Mrs. X's logic is like this: Z and I are irreconcilable because we have too much in common. Like, he got mad of something upon which I also got mad; he keeps things to himself and I don't tell; he distrusts everybody and that's my characteristic, too. Therefore, still according to Mrs. X, Z and I cannot talk the way we probably should; Z ended up feeling heavily, unfairly distrusted, and I slammed the door in a bout of rage out of feeling the same. I know Z always told his mom that the sun keeps on shining, the humming birds keep on whatevering, the lilies in the field are blooming, the air is 100% free of carbon emission and the oceans are calm and pretty - whatever the actual circumstance might be. He loves his mom above all else - I don't get jealous of the mother only because I, too, love her. Mrs. X is "just an ordinary mom" - she would have gotten out of her wits since 1977 if she were my mother. One of Z's sisters always feels that the mother is too fussy, meddles too much in the kids' lives - this is a legitimate complaint. Yet, that's what 'ordinary mothers' do - even my Mom will, if she were given a chance. But Z is a more difficult kid than I am. He has been a difficult kid all his life since the day he annoyed the whole Economy Class passengers on an intercontinental plane in - what, 1969? -- that his mom got to fly First Class - the man today hasn't changed much in that matter. Mom's troubles gotten from me has only been a small dose, while she should have been getting tons of the worst. The difference is, I have never intended to make Mom happy. Z does, about his mom. He consciously concocts white lies for that purpose. I had never bothered. If something bad happened to me, or I did something horrible, I clammed up - I simply didn't tell anything, not even good things. I guess what Mrs. X meant by "things in common" evolves around interpersonal relationships - both Z and I could get sort of paranoid from time to time for our own reasons. But Z's distrust of everyone is a normal thing. He wasn't happy with his family only because his ambition and dreams are way beyond the container available in his hometown. Naturally everyone else - except his mother - treated him like a fool, like a singing frog wishing to turn Prince Charming if only he got to Hollywood (or something of that sort) - if not for this, if he were another type of a dreamer, he would have been very happy there. I can't say I come from such a family. Mine has never been a "happy family" the way even Mrs. X's could fit into - factually, her family endured a lot of things that wouldn't be described as a happy family's, and the dysfunction is also there - but mine is only a 'club' of fierce individuals who happened to get connected to each other by the law - really, since blood-relation doesn't mean much to us, not just to me. Mrs. X will forever disbelieve this, but if I were to get in jail for instance, Mom would not care a fig and her only concern would have been how I smeared her face in front of the whole of her world. Both in good and bad senses, everyone in my family be for him and her dear old Self, almost no room for anything illogical concerning each other. We have no illusion whatever about other members of the same 'club' there. I still can't say a good many things are 'common' between me and Z, even if a few personal traits might look like so. These few, like I just said, were born out of different reasons and backgrounds. So basically we have nothing in common. Similar taste in music, readings, stuff like tattoos and long hair and such - these are never significant although I know so many people even got married for life just based on this kind of 'things in common'. She asked me if I want to "spend the rest of (my) life with Z" - I WILL spend the rest of my life FOR Z even if we'd never met at all. This much I am sure - how I love him is beyond Mrs. X's wildest imagination, even though she already is too proud of her kids and always says people are crazy about them. But I can only want to be with him when he is in his worst moments of life - when he is at the bottom of the pit - because otherwise he doesn't, he wouldn't, need me. With that kind of superficial personality (which he always wears like a beautiful mask), he had never even have to do anything to get friends and women --they came to him like moths to the lamp. I can't have him locked up and embalmed just for me; unless I am willing to risk being the bitterest of his enemies. I'm the kind of person whose dream consists of the little town in the deep North American inland - Z will die of boredom and impotent rage if he is to live there for more than a weekend. He is drawn by his own magnets of starlets and the buzz of showbiz and he is after everything that glitters - even if he is to be just a man in a sidewalk crowd he wouldn't give this away for anything else. Yeah, I believe we don't have any such a thing as a common ground. And in this business love is never enough. Sadly not even mine for him, which is a zillion lightyears higher from what any other woman would ever be able to give. |
||||
|
|
|||||
|
December 25, 1999 |
I got the email a long time ago, but until today - months and months away - it is still in the '2BReplied' folder, untouched. I read it again this afternoon when it rained lavishly - the sky might have wanted to wash this country down the drain. But it doesn't know Indonesia has never gotten the commonsense to build drainage -- so my melancholy was interrupted by anxiety about whether the water on the alleyway would seep into my door. Oh, prosaic life. FG, one of the few men to whom I surrender an unconditional respect (i.e. the conditions had been automatically met), was in Angola when he wrote to me. I don't even know there was still a bloody clash there. I thought the civil war has ended. He always, to date, wrote of severing destroyed limbs and operating on kids who lost both eyes with a minimum availability of aenesthetics - and a minimum skill to do the job to begin with; FG is a regular all-purpose M.D., no surgeon. I didn't reply immediately because so much anguish was there in the words, so great a sorrow and disgust that reached the point of unbearability; I could not talk to a man in the midst of all these without getting myself restricted by soothing cliche and meaningless gestures of friendship. I know three or four people whose jobs with international NGO's have taken them all around the world to conflict zones. FG is only one in the row. Two of them are doctors, he and RK; VJ, SG and HJ are social workers with a little training on medical stuff just in case. They have been everywhere. They are witnesses of the cruelty of mankind towards each other. And they're human; this necessitates a breakdown once in while. FG is tall, endowed with muscles enough to make him a Mr. Universe candidate, very long curly blond hair - almost as long as mine. He never smiles. His almost green eyes always shine menacingly - maybe he isn't even aware of it. He is one of the most beautiful men I have ever met - but what is carved by time and experience on that 35 year-old face makes him emitting the aura of being Jesus crucified a hundred times. He speaks English rather brokenly, being a native Spanish. But with the limited stock of the international language he had managed to impart a lot of scary stories to homebound civilians like me. Stories to bring tears to Li'l Betsy -- something utterly, wholly, truly really meaningless to Big Betty, whose aseptic mind never got a room for anything further than the grocery. She never believed the tales were true and not snatched out of some archaic war movie. On and on the rain still falls outside the window at my back. Facing FG, RK, VJ and all, I see how small my stake is, how little I contribute, if ever; how insignificant my concern, if I do have it. God will one day take them all to heaven. But in the meantime I suggest to Him night after night to give all these guys some peace no matter how dark is the sky. And that they shouldn't, sometimes, see how blood wets the soil they stand at. I sent a reply at last to FG, just that I love him. I couldn't say anything else. I'm no better than Betty -- even though I've seen a lot more than she ever will. I couldn't say anything else to FG because I'm a human who worried about the leaks on the roof when he was out there minding strangers' dire need to stay alive.
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
Long After Mayday
Journal entry, January 25, 2004 Footnotes: General election years: Indonesia is having its second free election in 2004, and its first ever of electing a president by popular vote (hitherto it was done via the Parliament). Maybe I should have been locked up for political paranoia, but I distrust predictions of a peaceful rally. It never was, even under the New Order (see History of Indonesia). The last two elections, 1997 and 1999, left piles of ugly scars on the nation, too. "Never meant to break your heart": First example can be found anywhere, though I got Moby's Porcelain (© 1999 Moby) in mind when writing this piece down. Moby's lines are weird enough to any sane ear: "I never meant to hurt you/ I never meant to lie". Yeah right. I know that each one of us must have known one or two compulsive liars, but so far no one ever lies without meaning to -- or have you? Second example is snatched from the song Kayleigh © 1985 Marillion when it still got the Scotsperson Fish bending over the microphone. Unfortunate for me, the man I wrote this piece about has been listening to this song as a way to remember me by. Listen to Fish: "By the way, didn't I break your heart? Would you excuse me, I never meant to break your heart." The presence of 'by the way' and 'excuse me' render the apology totally meaningless -- guilt is played too lightly, and the thing Fish 'never meant' here is, to me, the act of apologizing itself. |
Somebody who broke my heart in 1986 has just apologised for it today (see what year this entry is of). It has been, if what he said was somewhat historical, a bizarre tail of guilt -- he had searched for me for years (since 1997, he said) just to say he's sorry. These days when I, like always in any general election year, have been feeling like a platoon of clowns are juggling bombs somewhere inside me, have been weird days in themselves; creatures from my distant past have been popping up of nowhere without warning [see another piece about one of the encounters]. What is different about this one is that the man -- one year older than I am, happily married with two kids now -- hasn't finished yet with his messy business of teenage love. And so haven't we. I never paid attention to my friends', foes' and phantoms' private grudge concerning their botched-up affairs back at the time of disco; my mind yawned at the very first mention of such a tale. Sucks, I thought. It has passed ages ago. Why bother? The culprits nailed in those personal stories of woe must have forgotten these people's names already. Unless, of course, they haven't. And they haven't. As a boy of 17, the man who has just retrekked me was an incredible salad of inedibles: he was sort of shy but very stubborn and singleminded, he never took anybody else's word as true but he couldn't live without confessing everything to someone, he was never lucky in love but he used to stock spare-parts of his love-life's vehicle. Day-dreaming about a girl-model at the time -- an anæmic hybrid between grace and manners -- he spared nothing and nobody to get to it. Finally knowing that the dream was unattainable (everybody else had already known this from the beginning!), he took the nearest girl careless enough to say yes to his proposal. For her, he left without a word another girl who loved him like a slave back then, who went so far in her ambition to become a doormat that she made herself the matchmaker for the boy in the pursuit of the model. But it didn't take long for another dream to bud in the boy's head; he, characteristically wordlessly, dumped the second girl in favor of another, to whom nature had thoughtfully granted a pair of boobs 100 lbs each or so -- some sure weapons against this cruel world to live in. Yeah, I was the careless girl who saw through him and yet relied on hope that he would somehow learn to get real. He never did, until he lost the last woman he saw before he met the current wife. The girl that I was didn't feel sorry for the other girl that he jilted; I thought if she was so stupid then she might forget the entire thing the next morning. But I guess she hasn't. Just like I haven't forgotten what he did to me, even if the picture has become hazier by the corroding years. 18 years ago I knew why he never even said goodbye to those he left out in the cold; he never had the guts to. But even knowing this I wasn't saved from feeling like being tossed into some Indonesian sewer in the rainiest night; humiliation is always the thing hardest to endure to me and this was such a case. For a 16 year old, waking up in the morning to hear someone saying "You know what? Your boyfriend has been dating X since 2 months ago" was understandably a mindquake. It is good that he's somewhat sorry and willing to endure a minimum dose of acid shower I still couldn't help but to pour; problem is I couldn't find a folder to file this thing in. And so I began to understand what has gnawed at the guts of people I know -- they might have been equally clueless all these years about what to do with the relics of nasty days long way back. I got broken-hearted several times all my life, although I can't say it for certain because I tend to feel brokenhearted anytime after eating shrimps. I also broke several hearts during the same length of time, even though I suspect that the longest time only took approximately ten minutes. Question is, what to do with all these? Those don't matter now, not in daily life -- we grow up (or grow wide, for a lot people from my High School years) and we are, today, perhaps happy enough not to get upset about little cuts and bruises from lightyears back. I told him it's rather too much to apologize about 18 years ago; that he has perhaps contracted some virus that prompted excessive nicety. But is it really that easy? It took him so many years to get there -- and he said it's always been in his mind eversince. If that's true then he had suffered more than what I think is healthy for a numbskulled 17 year-old boy. I'm never made to be easily forgiving anyone and anything. I'm not subscribing to the notion of vendetta, but I'm only human -- and some things are doomed to be remembered as long as we live -- invariably this consists of the worst things that ever happened to you and me. I know I'll never forget every little slash of a knife that left scars on my soul. A few people even left their signatures upon my growth in the form of wounds that tend to bleed at least yearly every fifteenth monsoon night. While I might have been committing the same crime, although the law of human inconguency compels me to do that to exactly the people who had done nothing bad to me. When it comes to love-related stuff or so, the meaninglessness of apologies have been underlined by this pop culture we all cannot escape from. At the core of the thing the entire biz is silly; poptuners never cease to saturate the otherwise kind of cleanly calm air with stuff like "I never meant to hurt you" -- even these totally weird lines: "By the way, didn't I break your heart? Would you excuse me, I never meant to break your heart" [see footnotes] Well, I have never for the life of me ever heard of something like "He/she accidentally left her/him for somebody else"; have you? It is degraded lower still in retrospective apologies. The apology that we needed badly when we were 16 is actually of no practical use if flung at our ears today; it is like getting a lifeboat when the ship had already sunken a long time ago. The apology is just a ghost of it. The hurt is no longer real either in this sort of case. It could even get worse still! In general, apologies are already double-faced like cheap coins released by a hyper-inflated economy of a messy banana republic. When laddled out, they could end the agony suffered by the apologizers, while at the same time (or because of) the ones being apologized to started to get insomnia in turn. A past mistake would slumber away in time, within the locked room of natural forgetfulness (or repression). It stays there undisturbed and undisturbing -- until the day the perpetrator asks for forgiveness. Then it bursts open anew and kicks afresh the poor victim in wherever it hurts most. Apologizers are, I tend to believe, paragons of ultimate selfishness. We seek redemption for our guilty souls when we apologize; we never consider our victims' souls, just like we didn't care about them either when we committed the crime we now apologize for. Yet the boy I knew 18 years ago said he's sorry. In normal society, it is made to be my duty to say it is forgiven, so he can get back to sleep. Maybe we cannot do but that, regardless of what we may think about the subject. If there still be time, perhaps I better do the same to the victims of my own folly. Because we cannot -- it is absolutely illogical to -- dump a lover in favor of anyone or anything else by accident. We must have meant to. We did so intentionally. That's the only sane reason why we feel sorry. |
||||
|
|
|||||
|
Empirical
Mosaic
Sketch, 2001 An almost perfectly nonsensical endnote: Thanks to those to whom the following songs once mattered (in personally chronological order):
Footnotes: Love of My Life (© Queen) isn't a love song with smileys all over the lines. It's about a weepy broken-hearted man singing "Love of my life, you hurt me/You've broken my heart, and now you leave me/Love of my life, can't you see?/Bring it back, bring it back/Don't take it away from me because you don't know what it means to me" and so on. Though I was convinced that the boy simply didn't know what the lyric says (if you're an Indonesian Junior High student of my generation, the only English they taught you would have been barely enough to tell the time);it still fed my suspicion that he had chosen that particular song for purposes I would have hated so much to know about. Oh, well. (Sigh). Save a Prayer (© Duran Duran) is in no way whatsoever resembling I Saw Her Standing There (© The Beatles). The first is a ballad, so the beat is slow and mellow and sad -- you know, the usual characteristics. The second can be and had been danced to, it's one of those songs where tunes are racing against themselves all the song through in a merrymaking attempt. I might have made this up, but whatever I said wouldn't have changed the fact that my second first love was tone-deaf. Imagine what it's like to play lead guitar in that condition. Yikes.
|
In yet another evidence that sustains my private theory of her being a critter smuggled in from Mars upon mom's [mis]conception, my little sister just refreshed not just her memory but history altogether. "My first love was X," she announced last night, prompted by perhaps an overdose of Chinese takeout. "Yeah?" I must have sounded like colossally disinterested for she at once snapped. "Y-E-A-H! Well, of course before him there was Y, and before that Z," she said; "but my first love was X." After an everlasting pause of maybe ten seconds she added, "Because X was the best looking." Good reasoning. You cannot shoulder the blame for nailing the yummiest boy or girl of the specific time and place as your first love - who cares about the real story of your actual life where the first lovelike entry was represented by someone who, even in the jet-black moonless 2 A.M., looked like some 3 weeks-old piece of lettuce clogging the kitchen sink? Historically correct review of my sister's thing would surely give you a glimpse of validation for her conscious forgetfulness; her real first love involved a 14 year-old boy whose longest line ever spoken was "Ummm....", and he, and this is correctly historical, ran out of the yard the instant mom opened up the door to admit him in during the painful torture romantically referred to as "first date". That, against the image that time enhanced, of another boy who constantly smiled and talked and rode a shiny big bike, is understandably fit into oblivion. I have lived long enough to hear stories of first loves approximately like my sister's historical surgery upon memory. A whole lot of my buddies (i.e. four people in summer and two in winter, half of which hybernates) commit the same doctoring of the truth. "X? Naah. It was Y. She was so lovely in the prom dance and I still admire how graceful she was on the floor when she broke her heel falling." So I have been immensely, undeniably, historically and truthfully lucky: my real-life first love was the real-life Boy Right, and there were probably three hundred witnesses to verify the fact, not to mention the school janitors and a pair of vivisected frogs in the Physics Lab of Junior High. For reasons I didn't want to know, the Ben Affleck of the school asked me bluntly whether or not I would consent to date him on some basis of permanency one afterschool hour when the sun fried and my wings flapped and my head got the effect not unlike what LSD had done to the Beatles. Oh it was one heck of an irrational phenomenon; if I were President I would have made it a national holiday for all. I was 13. A troublesome age in an otherwise tranquil environment; I wasn't much of a girl and all I could boast of me was just that I knew how to lead tourists away from their intended destination. All other girls were beautiful and richly dressed and never ever swore; and worst the communally agreed-upon as the best-looking girl sat a desk away from mine in the same classroom. She got everything - perfect hair, fair skin, refined speech, and was swelling in the right places - though unfortunately the enlargement didn't involve her brain. But who wanted brain anyway in the age of adrenaline (or of anything at all)? And this girl wanted him for a picture-perfect date, and from then on kept annoying me with unnecessary parade of flesh. Yet, the 14 year-old Affleck asked me, not her, and why, I pray no one would ever give me the answer. I should have taken it as a forbidding omen when he gave me Queen's song "Love of My Life" as I turned 14 - the exact day we broke up by the way [see footnote]. He dated another school's Beauty Queen in two weeks time, and I went into bike-racing. I wasn't missing him much because someone told me I would never miss an Aries. Meanwhile, our school's Prom Queen from my class kept on swelling in by then every part; the title had to be relegated to some lab frogs. My next first love was 15, I was of the same age, only not a bit changed from the duckling I was at the time of the frog-infested Lab sessions. But the object of my affection this time wasn't even six billion miles close to the looks Affleck had. He wasn't distinguishable among a horde; his mom took ten days to recognize him among babies laid in isolation room when he was born. In fact, I sometimes mistook him as one of the desks, because he was, in addition, so silent. They said Taurus people are habitually wordless. Well, I should have minded this when it wasn't so regrettable yet; my little sister too is a Taurean. But he played guitars good enough for my not-yet stratospheric standard; I was the one who fell first in a school party where he played "Save a Prayer" (Duran Duran) in front of a wholly bewildered audience - because the singer sang "I Saw Her Standing There" (Beatles) [see footnote]. He, in a faithful historical record like this I must confess so, never noticed the difference between the two songs. But it was too late to rewind - and it was also too late to reverse my falling-in-love occasion. So we dated for maybe a year, until I grew tired of acoustic guitars and especially Duran Duran for every other song he was expected to yield. We parted in some honest indifference. Then I entered a brief alliance with someone who was already a man to my bound-to-peers mind; he was a freshman in college while I wasn't even into High School yet. I always thought of anybody more than 2 years older than I was as approaching deathbed or awaiting retirement pension. So it was no wonder that I started to devise schemes to get out of the relationship after spending like five minutes with him as girlfriend. Problem was, he was kind and gentle and whatever Barbara Cartland used to scribe about (Barbara Cartland was probably my Grandma's age, but clearly her head was my little sister's, who was 14). I had to endure several botched-ups before finally mom had to interfere (because she was called to), telling him that I wasn't interested in marrying anybody, not even him, because I planned celibacy. For God's sake I was 16 that time - but when I told him we should have broken up he took his mother to the house and proposed to marry me. I still feel a little guilty now for the way I turned this down, now that I know it was a very rare historical item, being proposed to. But at the time I knew no better than rejoicing that he at last receded. I didn't even ask what his sign was. Probably Cancer. He loved crabs so much that he got it tattooed on his arm, though for some cryptic reason it came with the word "Mom". The fourth first love was a generally rather clumsy boy of 17 that I first spotted in High School upon entrance. The second I saw him, I had wanted him though nothing to that direction was done. I, in a rare bout of decency, kept a distance. He looked like too scared of me to consider any sort of alliance except maybe for criminal extortion, but I was in love so I didn't really notice this aversion - especially when there was a loud Deep Purple in the air. It took so goddamned long before he asked me to be - something; it wasn't audible because he got the tendency to mumble keywords of any sentence. Maybe it was my mistake that I didn't ask him to repeat it louder or write it down. Now that I am recalling the episode again, it occurs to me that perhaps what he was saying at the basketball court was "I want you to be...have. What do you think?" According to an overzealous astrologer that I knew in Maryland last year, my weakness is whenever I encounter Libra male persons. In time I could say it might be right; but that year I wasn't even thinking of such nonsense. He got the perfect height and weight and size of eyes and nose and lips and conversational skill; those were enough. I never like over-talkative guys and I positively dislike super-quiet ones. This boy got a face like a cat's - that perhaps was the clincher. So I was with him doing all good things such as sitting together at the front porch saying nothing, until suddenly I woke up to hear that he had been dating another girl for two months while I peacefully, unsuspectingly, slumbered. That girl looked like Cindy Crawford after having been run over several times by the Red Army tanks. But she got a swollen chest that made her stoop when walking; no doubt my ex-boyfriend there thought of this as charming. His notions of sex at the time involved everything but sex, so I guess this must have been an awakening. Then for the first time in my younger years I got twelve-months of datelessness. I might have been brokenhearted after the Dolly Partonesque predator disrupted my love life, or maybe I abstained from dating because it couldn't get along well with making money. I worked on Saturdays. My fifth first love came along one day after being there for a whole year without me considering him as a candidate for such a thing; I guess it was hitherto reciprocal because he never even lifted his eyes from the guitar and I doubt if he ever knew I existed. The one time he took his eyes off the guitar was when he asked me to boyfriend him. I said more or less "Okay," and then he got back to the strings. With this first love, my youth ended; but luckily it was also the best of the lot. We were 18 when the thing started. His was the best way to love me despite the high probability that on board of the Titanic he would have jumped to save his guitar and only a year afterwards he remembered I was there on the sinking ship too - and he only remembered this when reading obituaries on Sunday papers. Now those experiences have been confined to memory. We all learned and unlearned. But my constant problem in this department stays the same: I never believed that anybody would love me, not before I could collect evidence to get it verified by deeds and actions. It isn't a baseless paranoia. Too many times I got boys to men confessing the most romantic things in broad daylight just out of some misreading of their own feelings and intentions. Some of them even transparently belonged to the league of unspeakabilities. There was someone I knew in High School who wrote me long and winding love letters because he thought I was popular enough in school; another that I knew in college said he loved me merely because he had vowed to stalk every "famous people"'s daughters (he succeeded; by now he has been married to the Rector's daughter). Most of still others were just plainly sort of bewitched though I have no idea how come. I shudder recalling all these crushes they mistook as love - all they wanted was for me to juggle fireballs and put my head into lions' mouths and do snake-dancing and be a stand-up commedienne for their monopolistic amusement; or to preach them on how to treat plumbers, or teach them about the upside of doom, the downside of bliss and where approximately God is. Even these ones; most of the time over the various entries I never felt like being loved. Yet it is conventional to call the empirical stuff "love". We have no other word. That's why it comes to be so often alluded to, and in this rate of inflation it is rendered worthless. First love never dies, they keep on saying all these two thousand years. Maybe so. All these first loves of mine stay inside my mind the way they always were; two of the actors are still the ones I couldn't but love today after so long; the rest were nothing but cool memories of a long gone era when I was still young enough to lose everything on Monday and get everything the next Wednesday. I don't know where these men are now. I think it is sane of me to assume that none of them remembers who I was. And I feel sorry for anyone who might have remembered me as his first love - it must have been an ordeal enough. Here and now I wish for nothing for them but the attainable best. They once colored my world, like successive strokes on a drawing that, when completed in years to come, is what I always am. |
