Life is a funny thing-when we are young,unaware of it's brevity we tend to make choices that could quite reasonably be judged insane by other people not in our situation.These choices are sometimes made in the erroneous belief that "it'll work out for the best".It is only in later life,when after waiting years for something to work out for the best,we realse it's not going to happen.By then,it is usually far too late to change the situation and we have to live with it.A friend of mine is in just such a situation,and it's so sad to witness.
A few years ago,she met and fell in love with a guy who she was convinced could never love her back.The guy was handsome,polite and employed.He was also looking to settle down-ALL the things she was looking for in a man-she was just past thirty,recently divorced from a man who was allergic to work,treated her like an ATM machine and cheated on her with both men and women.Not surprisingly,she was suffering from a serious case of low self-esteem by the time she managed to extricate herself from the relationship(it took her years of therapy to undo the damage this bastard had done) and naturally did not believe herself worthy of love.
One day, in early May,feeling totally unloved,she decided to go to the local shoppping mall -she had some money and thought a spot of retail therapy might lift her mood.Whilst there,this dishy guy came up and asked for directions and they got chatting.An hour later,they were at her place engaged in things she had only heared whispered about at her Catholic boarding school.Talking about it later, her comment was that the guy was so sexy she lost all sense of reason.This kind of behaviour was totally alien to her-among our group of friends,she was the least sexually experienced(we think that was why she did not realise the relationship with her ex-husband was wrong).
Life can be funny in a cruel way- for a while she did everything to push him away,and he kept coming back.Just as she decided he was genuine,he broke her heart.He stopped taking her phonecalls and she's not seen him since.Although deeply upset by this,she learned a valuable lesson-you cannot build a wall around your heart for fear of being hurt-it sneaks up on you when you least expect it to.
Looking back at it later,it is all too easy to condemn her actions that summer with the wisdom of hindsight.To be totally fair,she never did it again and even now,seven years
later she's still appalled by her actions.She was lucky to survive the experience-he could have been an axe murderer or any number of undesirables -a very real possibility as she was living in a rather rough part of town at that time.
My friend is now terminally ill(a real irony considering she now looks better than she's ever looked in her life,having lost some weight and allowed her hair to grow shoulder length)and is now looking for closure to this part of her life.Because of the nature of her illness,she has only a limited time to find this guy and say goodbye before the disease makes walking and talking impossible.We fear she might have left it too late.
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