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January 11, 2009

"It takes other people to make a life whole."

... or is that "to make a life hole"?

The first thing I read every Sunday morning in the online New York Times is the Weddings/Celebrations column. There's always a color photo and (even better) sometimes even a slide show of the trip to the church (synagogue/mosque/museum), the bridesmaids (flower girls/ring boys/ushers), the family laughing and dancing (eating/drinking/speechifying), the ceremony. Couples' ages tend to run to "old enough to know better," and yet there they are, bucking the odds that they'll still be together once the wedding bills have been paid.

This morning once again I'm sitting in the kitchen, looking out my windows, somebody else's nuptial pictures glowing in high-definition color on the screen in front of me. The street is empty, the houses are dark. My own house is quiet except for the noise of the heat pump. Everything outside my window is brown and gray and it's hard to imagine that the shining world of today's smiling couple even exists, that it is possible for it to exist.

When I was much younger and too stupid to know any better, I would say in conversations about love and marriage and all that, "I think we just live too long to be monogamous." I felt that I could make this pronouncement not because it is a truth, but because it somehow did not apply to me. My life would be different, my marriage would sail on, impervious to the hard-wired vagaries of love's attention span.

One divorce later and another marriage ended in every way but the formalities, here I sit alone in my kitchen, 53 and not getting any younger, as the saying is, thinking (as I do every Sunday morning), about happily ever after. Would I take the chance again? Almost five years ago I thought, "No one will ever love me again." Now I think, "Will I ever love anyone again?" ... or, I guess if I have to be honest, I think, "Will I ever want to love anyone again?"

I don't know the answer, but I'm leaning toward getting another cat.

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)