Love Disappointed

 

“They say that anger is just love disappointed

They say that love is just a state of mind”

~The Eagles

 

I set out to look for love on a rainy day in September, dressed in my Sunday best and I thought I had found it when I knocked on your door. I was confident that the door would open and that I would be welcome to share a part of your life. I was not wrong.

The door opened into a hallway littered with mirrors. I could see myself from all angles and in all kinds of odd shapes. I was a dwarf in one mirror and a giant in another. I was fat. I was slim. The list goes on. You were there too, flitting between the mirrors- a red glimpse at the corner of my eye, that made me turn around, only to be faced by yet another distorted image of my own figure.

But it seemed to me that in my quest to find you, I had forgotten me. It seemed as if I had forgotten how much I enjoyed my own company, curled up in bed on a winter morning with a book, or cooking like a madman in the kitchen because I’d told my father I wanted to surprise him. I’d forgotten how my gut would tell me when to add salt to the chicken, or overcook it ever so slightly.

I’d forgotten how calming it all was.

And so, I gave up trying to find you and instead focused on finding me. I found a version of me that would never have been able to come to this decision. Had I made you up? Were you only a figment of my imagination? Were you akin to what O’Henry wrote in The Pendulum about how Katy was as necessary as the air John Perkins inhaled- necessary and yet scarcely noticed?

Was I someone in an Ishiguro story? Maybe I could be the man trying to save his marriage by going to Venice with his wife? Except even that didn’t work, did it?

So maybe the thing I should really love is my solitude and the friends that help me deal with that solitude when it gets too much?

Maybe, one day I shall stand atop a cliff and photograph the sea hundreds of feet below me. Maybe one day I shall go somewhere in Paris and decide that this is where my journey ends

Maybe none of this will happen and maybe I’m asleep? Maybe the alarm will wake me soon and I’ll find the dog slobbering over my bedclothes while you make coffee for me in the kitchen which is smelling of bacon fat?

I wonder…