Let's pretend your name is Leigh. You're 32 years old. You
and your husband are mid-divorce. Like many newly separated people, you lose a
lot of weight. It's mostly because you live on cigarettes, the odd piece of
beef jerky and guilt—guilt about failing at marriage, about disappointing your
family, about being so poisonous that everything you touch withers.
Each Saturday evening, you drive 45 minutes from your tiny
rural Massachusetts town to a bigger rural Massachusetts town, the one with the
highway, the multiplex and the fancy new Trader Joe's. In that glorious
supermarket, you walk the aisles filling the cart with triple-crème Camemberts
and thick-cut steaks and vats of clam chowder, not to mention a gallon or two
of hand-squeezed orange juice; all foods you hope will fatten you up and make
you look saner and more healthful and dateable. Only this has not been
working...at all...and this particular Saturday, while midway through the dried
pasta aisle, you have to physically pull your face together in order to not
weep all over yourself. There is nothing intrinsically sad about a box of
tortellini, and you are in the middle of a grocery store, for God's sake.
Finally, with little-to-no elegance, you make it to the
cashier, who whisks your items into a sturdy, flat-bottomed paper bag, then
tucks the receipt in at the top. You pick up the bag and trudge toward the
rubber mat that opens the exit door. First you hear the rip—then the explosion,
as all that hand-squeezed orange juice and clam chowder and Camembert hit the
floor and smash open, the bottom of the bag having fallen out.
Standing there, you recognize that in another time of your
life, cream-based soup squishing through your tennis shoes might have prompted
you to laugh, or to call for help. But tonight is this time in your life:
You're alone. You're broken-hearted and self-loathing. You're not able to move
forward and you never will be and you're stuck and you're going to be all by
yourself for forever. You are one of those people now—the ones who not even the
God of Grocery Store Bags looks out for; the ones who Love forgot.
You slump down onto the stack of charcoal-briquette bags
positioned by the door. Looking over the events of your life, you suddenly
understand you may have joined this group much earlier than you thought. Like
the time in middle school when you believed your dad might somehow show up for
the father-daughter dance, even though he lived 5,000 miles away, right up to
the very moment of entering the gym and not seeing him standing there with a
name tag and a sign reading, "Surprise!" Or the time in high school
when you believed that guy (with the girlfriend) would (leave his girlfriend
and) take you to prom.
On both those occasions, Love did not show up. Maybe it just
got tired. Or, considering its vast responsibilities in China and Brazil,
Minnesota and Rhode Island and Syracuse, it got stressed; and, as happens with
all of us, it did not look at the calendar and failed to show up at the
expected time.
Source of Story. http://www.oprah.com/relationship. /What-to-Do-When-Love-Forgets
No comments:
Post a Comment