The Real LJ Idol: "Another Ride On The Merry-Go-Round"
Another Ride On The Merry-Go-Round
real lj idol | week 16 | 531 words
Reinventing the wheel
x-x-x-x-x
It goes like this:
You knew something once about empty holes inside your heart, about the searing ache of loss and exactly how you got there. But fear is not a way to live, so you buried the past and found a way to try again.
Mutual friends brought the two of you together. Some low-key pretense of a potluck dinner and a few glasses of unremarkable wine, and you remembered how to talk and to flirt toward the promise of a phone number and the chance to see if the chemistry between you was more than a one-time thing.
You had your coffee-date pas de deux, your Sunday morning brunch, your late-night Foucault/Hegel throwdown, and your elegant evening of veal scallopini followed by brandy in front of the fireplace at home.
You both thought you'd caught the brass ring. Six months later, you were living together and choosing china patterns, like children following a script for grownup living and trying not to fall off the paper-thin edges.
It took three years for you to see that volatility was not passion, that suffering was not depth. Mediations melted into the stiff, legal jargon of alienation of affection and dissolution of property.
You lived out of boxes and slept with the television on until Spring, wondering if you would ever make your way back out of the miasma again.
It goes like this:
You weren't looking for complicated, but somehow you found it. You just never saw it coming.
Lazy weekend laughter with Farmers' Market Saturday mornings and afternoons by the river slipped into evenings of Chinese food and DVDs on the living room floor. You woke up together on Sundays, and did the breakfast-newspaper slow-dance before going your separate ways and rushing through a week's worth of chores before the corporate treadmill started up again.
It was all so easy and simple until the diaphragm broke, and then everything was different, including you.
Companionable, good-time carousing wasn't a solid basis for raising a family. You looked for something deeper, hoped with everything that it was possible. But one of you thought kids wouldn't change anything, while the other thought they sure as hell should, and that turned out to be the most important distinction of all.
You split up, agreeing to disagree (whatever the hell that meant), and started counting down the remaining seven-months to an adventure from which there would be no turning back.
It goes like this:
There are times you feel as if you could sleep standing up, as if exhaustion parallels psychosis, as if your major appliances are all plotting to kill themselves one by one.
But then your baby sighs in her sleep, or leans her head against your neck. The sweet smell of her is like a reprieve, the sound of her laugh a reminder of all the world can be. She gazes at you with all the trust in the universe, lights up when you walk into the room, and kicks with happiness when she hears your voice.
You are someone better than you used to be, and you've barely gotten started.
That's when you know that this love is the one that will finally last.
If you enjoyed this entry, you can vote for it along with the other fine entries here
real lj idol | week 16 | 531 words
Reinventing the wheel
x-x-x-x-x
It goes like this:
You knew something once about empty holes inside your heart, about the searing ache of loss and exactly how you got there. But fear is not a way to live, so you buried the past and found a way to try again.
Mutual friends brought the two of you together. Some low-key pretense of a potluck dinner and a few glasses of unremarkable wine, and you remembered how to talk and to flirt toward the promise of a phone number and the chance to see if the chemistry between you was more than a one-time thing.
You had your coffee-date pas de deux, your Sunday morning brunch, your late-night Foucault/Hegel throwdown, and your elegant evening of veal scallopini followed by brandy in front of the fireplace at home.
You both thought you'd caught the brass ring. Six months later, you were living together and choosing china patterns, like children following a script for grownup living and trying not to fall off the paper-thin edges.
It took three years for you to see that volatility was not passion, that suffering was not depth. Mediations melted into the stiff, legal jargon of alienation of affection and dissolution of property.
You lived out of boxes and slept with the television on until Spring, wondering if you would ever make your way back out of the miasma again.
It goes like this:
You weren't looking for complicated, but somehow you found it. You just never saw it coming.
Lazy weekend laughter with Farmers' Market Saturday mornings and afternoons by the river slipped into evenings of Chinese food and DVDs on the living room floor. You woke up together on Sundays, and did the breakfast-newspaper slow-dance before going your separate ways and rushing through a week's worth of chores before the corporate treadmill started up again.
It was all so easy and simple until the diaphragm broke, and then everything was different, including you.
Companionable, good-time carousing wasn't a solid basis for raising a family. You looked for something deeper, hoped with everything that it was possible. But one of you thought kids wouldn't change anything, while the other thought they sure as hell should, and that turned out to be the most important distinction of all.
You split up, agreeing to disagree (whatever the hell that meant), and started counting down the remaining seven-months to an adventure from which there would be no turning back.
It goes like this:
There are times you feel as if you could sleep standing up, as if exhaustion parallels psychosis, as if your major appliances are all plotting to kill themselves one by one.
But then your baby sighs in her sleep, or leans her head against your neck. The sweet smell of her is like a reprieve, the sound of her laugh a reminder of all the world can be. She gazes at you with all the trust in the universe, lights up when you walk into the room, and kicks with happiness when she hears your voice.
You are someone better than you used to be, and you've barely gotten started.
That's when you know that this love is the one that will finally last.
If you enjoyed this entry, you can vote for it along with the other fine entries here