April 2009

I always thought I'd meet the man of my dreams on, say, a Tuesday and we'd be in a laundromat and I'd be reading a book while waiting for my clothes to dry. And then he would stride purposefully in, setting down his basket of clothes and maybe dropping a t-shirt on the way. I'd watch him search all his pockets for some quarters and then he'd finally cash in some singles, uncrumpling them and feeding them into a machine. Then he'd start the machine, sitting down in a chair, jiggling a knee, standing up again to read the bulletin board hanging above his head. He'd read everything twice through, even the dog-walking service flyer, even though he doesn't have a dog, and sit back down. Some sort of stars-aligned situation would cause him to talk to me and immediately see my shyness as endearing (an introvert's dream) and we'd spend the rest of the wash cycles talking and talking and talking until we finally left together to get a milkshake.

While I did actually meet him on a Tuesday, several things would prove to be impossible. Waiting for my clothes to dry in a machine, for example. The lack of quarters in the euro currency. My sudden lactose intolerance preventing that milkshake. Other details were wholly replaced by others and I had to be the one to talk to him (being the teacher and all). And in all actuality, I'm the knee-jiggler.

It was nothing like I'd imagined and nothing I could ever expect. Unfortunately the same can be said for some everyday struggles that exist nowadays, the fog traipsing through my clear thoughts and leaving them lost. It's always a losing battle. For every one time you are successful at keeping the fog at bay, there are five other times you fail. Nothing is real. And you look back to when you were happier and how much easier things were then. Innocence was lost and the full extent of your wreckage lies before you. I am a good person, you insist.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
From A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, on F. Scott Fitzgerald