Memoir 9

It's been some time since you last revisited your life. You thought you would not bother to mention Laura, but some recent developments now make it worthwhile to examine in depth this painful episode of your life. In some ways and indeed many times you have wished that you had never met her. You met her in your freshman year in college. One day she came to you and asked to borrow lecture notes. She had been sick the week before. It is indeed a struggle to write these words, not because you had nothing to say, but because the memories you deemed once beautiful are probably merely a romanticization stemming from immaturity and impracticality. So, in the interest of sparing yourself of further signs of stupidity, you are going to gloss over soapy, childish, ridiculous memories and concentrate on events that have forced me to grow up, no matter how belatedly. Nah, you just can't do it. It is not so much the lingering pain that stopped you in spilling your guts as the farcical manner of her dumping you. Now you are facing the potential of a similar farce. Ll

Your latest forays into sociological and anthropological experiments are about to be over. You have discovered that you are weak and sentimental. You are much better off to stay in your world of reading and body-building. You came up with the joke which jibed with the theme of Gift of Gab (Two  women met. They talked.

-You're quite a garrulous girl. In fact, you've got a gift of gab. Was it how you got your man?

-Yes. I talked him into submission.)

making everybody at the dinner table double over with laughter. In a moment of vanity and weakness, you sent to everyone you could think of. That won't happen again as now you know everybody was uber-serious (what is going in this world? "you need to laugh a little, joke a little, cry a little, love a little [repeat, 'little', not 'much', 'much' is stupid and dangerous, touch everything lightly, even with tragedy, life is essentially a joke in a strange and unfamiliar language) without fear. You didn't think the joke was risqué. It was, subjectively speaking, hilarious as hell, if hell ever can be funny.

We all march to different drummers. You temporarily forgot that. And that was ok you forgot. Now you remember that and you recovered. Armed with a newly found sense of absurdity and stoicism, you brushed off the brush-off and you moved on while trying to remember that tact can be a difference between life and death, success and failure. Love is to learn not to be self-righteous.


(to be continued)