Well, everything up to the happily ever after part. My history is a quagmire of messy break-up’s and failed relationships. Love is a story we tell each other. It’s one we tell ourselves, and it’s one told by others - often quietly in the comfort of our own homes, out of the reach of strangers, recanted passionately in the stories we tell our friends and family about why the so-and-so’s just aren’t in our lives anymore. There’s a pat on the back, a ‘you’ll find the right person,’ and the offer of a distraction, like to read more books or practice some kind of exercise.
In terms of self-betterment, I’ve put those things aside as a waste of time. And it’s good that I’m writing you this rather than telling you in person, because surely you’d immediately try to convince me otherwise: reading and exercise are not a waste of time. I exercise my mind when I write, and I don’t do that enough. So it’s time to get back into it.
Now, at this stage, everything is screenplays, or internal dialogue. I’ve lived in the same city my entire life, and I can’t go anywhere without running into some ex-girlfriend or seeing my initials next to hers with a heart in the middle. The most difficult part of a break-up, psychologically, is the separation between two people who are technically the same individual: the woman you thought you knew when you met her, and the person whom you find her out to be. Or the guy who completely changed the day something happened, and afterwards he was never the same.
Those types of scenarios are common in people’s lives, and I would say that the rate of failed relationships to successful ones actually surpasses it in number by many fold, not just because of divorce but also due to all of the other relationships which don’t even make it to engagements. The graveyard of false promises, and lost hope, this field of names carved into stone.
Some people have almost a contempt for love. They want it to fail. They’d rather see something crash and burn into a flaming wreckage simply because it would be more entertaining. Their minds can’t contemplate the possibility of one more day of waking up and having oat meal by the window, sitting opposite him or her reading the paper, or nowadays flipping around on his or her cellphone, reading literally whatever. The concept that one day could lead to another along this endless stream of repetitive blunders, relieved only by a chance encounter of some sort.
Women are crazy. Men are crazy. People are crazy.
And there is this debate over what are facts, and what is truth, and it seems to continue no matter what people say, or how strong their opinions are. It could be that we’ll never know, but what makes it so much more difficult is just how challenging coming to a consensus can actually be, and to some extent that is the source of much failure in many relationships. Once someone puts their foot down and says “i’m not budging” it’s as though the force of continental drift takes over and slowly tears it all away. Rips it to shreds.
Song, please.