‘My girlfriend is getting texty,’ the man who ticks every box and makes me go aglow inside informs me. He’s a trombonist, and that alone should tell me everything I need to know. Except he’s also tall and blond and a bit Scandinavian looking and exceptionally friendly, and he has that borderline cute proportion of a long torso and comparatively short legs that make him just simply adorable.
I have nothing to say about this. Therein lies the ‘interesting’ realisation. It’s ‘interesting’ in so far as I normally have something to say about things. I pride myself—not ‘pride myself’ so much as find a certain degree of satisfaction that I try not to let seep into smugness if I can possibly help it, though sometimes I think in this I fail—in being able to find words. I like words, I love—nay, relish!—them. I use more words than necessary. What is necessary? I get admonished for being verbose. What, pray, is verbose? I say things for the sake of saying them. Thrice. I use language people don’t understand, but I get tasked with making things understandable, as a job. I like that. I like ironies, I like perplexities, I like conundrums and calling them conundra. I have said so before, but I like to say things again. I like repetition. Repetition. There you go: I like it. (I like brackets, and elliptical asides…)
In the Game of Love & Chance—I like ampersands! And I love interjections—I am particularly useless, but I have of late started to enjoy that fact, rather than despair over it. It used to trouble me. Astonishing men like my Trombonist Friend right here and right now used to send me down a spiral of remorse and regret, about what I knew not.
About not having loved. About not having lived. About not having taken the chance. Now that I’ve taken the chance once or twice and then thrice and several times more, and notwithstanding the fact that this has sometimes but certainly not always paid off, and now that I realise that a ‘girlfriend getting texty’ is just exactly the kind of thing that would drive me up the wall, even if it were a boyfriend as handsome and delectable as her boyfriend right now, I can smile at the man’s beauty and charm and listen to the resonance of his torso and admire the sounds he produces from his instrument and say to myself: that has nothing whatever to do with me. It’s wonderful, and wonderful for him too. And I wish him really, and genuinely, well.
I love that kind of love. It’s taken me maybe forty-nine years—seven heptades!—to get to this point, but I’m now at a point where I can absolutely love a man like that and know his life has absolutely nothing to do with me beyond the set of fortuitousnesses that brought us together in this context, at this moment, for this short period, and then let that be as it may. And should our paths cross again, then so much the better, but it would still not mean anything else or anything more or anything less. And should we become friends through our paths crossing further, that too would be just that, and it would be just fine. My Trombonist Friend shows me that I am all right. He is marvellous, in my mind; and let that forever be so: I am perfectly all right with that too.
We part and go our separate ways, and I think of it or of him no more, and I am where I once was and where for a long time I longed to be anew: unencumbered and free. I use these words a lot, I now find, it must mean they have become important to me.
I see on the social network that he’s doing something exciting with his trombone and his musician friends and the band somewhere, and I am deeply happy and unreasonably proud. I have no cause and no reason to be proud, I have nothing to do with his or any of his colleagues’ achievements, but I still feel a little proud of him and of them, as if it had something to do with me. And maybe it does have something to do with me, in as much as I know him, and we’ve once tangentially worked together (worked on the same piece, at least, for a very short while), and so at least in as much as everything is connected, and this therefore perhaps really also connects us a little, it may have a tiny little something to do with me, and that thought alone makes me happier still.
And now the words are there, and they are no better and no worse than any other, and that too is just fine and dandy. All words need not be weighty and grave. Some could do with being a bit more poetic probably than they are, but mostly they merely need to ring true. And this, to me, if nothing else, is true.
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EDEN by FREI 