>"...and here we stand
the desolate red desert sky
folded across a woman's bosom
and I with my unchorded evensong,
boiling mud pools in my coffee cup
cracked earth streaked with a river
that runs like a half-dry tear
down its wrinkled face.
Tired and tireless
Still together, still apart,
still yearning,
the sky and I..."

Today I learnt that a very good friend is getting married in January, and it was long coming and he had been single for a very very long time. Technically, I should be happy for him, technically I am happy for him, but some part of me was a little wistful. Perhaps it is the knowledge that nothing lasts forever, perhaps it is the knowledge that one day when the early morning mist has been steam-cooked and dried out by the humid sea-salt heavy midday noon sun that more mundane things will replace the sheer joy of discovering that your partner likes her eggs fried on both sides with the edges overdone to burnt, and the adventure that comes from knowing that she goes to bed with her legwarmers on, scrunched up in the foetal position and buries her face under two gigantic pillows, and smiles to herself in her sleep will all be replaced by the irritable urgency of waking her up in the morning so you can get a steaming cup of tea or coffee as you please, or that the things you so adored about her in the beginning, the things that were radically and magically different, the things that held you spellbound in the beginning, the things you couldn’t quite trace a pulse to, the things that left her a little “undefinable”, a little “non-compartmentalisable” are starting to grate on your nerves now, making you wish for some “sameness, like-mindedness”, some commonalities, some “definableness”. That the differences are simply piling up like a mountain of unwashed laundry, wanting to be heard and making you scream inside at times, and that the poetry is getting lost in the drive to work and the grocery shopping and the vacuuming and the cooking of quick meals on the go. Or maybe I am just an incorrigible cynical bitch, who sees no glimmer of hope in human relationships, just a hopeless loser who sees the end before the beginning has begun, a jaded woman who cannot find it in herself to be happy in someone else’s discovery of paradise. Yeah that’s me alright. I deserve to be shot. Somebody do the honors. I am a sorry scum-bag, for believing that “nothing lasts forever and we all know hearts can change…”

Perhaps it is also possible that there are two warring factions if you will, in life – the mob of the married people on the one hand and the mob of the single people on the other, and each hates the other’s single or married status (as the case maybe) with equal vehemence.  And both want to be a sworn member of the other squad, and that the singles club would secretly wish to be a part of the other club (which involves burnt breakfast eggs, and dirty laundry threatening to spill out of the washer, and quick pasta dinners leaving sticky residue on the flame burner, and your favorite iced tea bottle emptied out to be mixed in some godforsaken unheard of cocktail, shmocktail (ok so I am not that much of a spoilsport, but humor me, here, will ya?), and also involves a warm human being to cuddle, share TV dinners with, share the dresser mirror with in the morning rush-to-work, jostle with for make-up space and shaving space all at a few minutes after seven in the morning, and laugh with at totally inane email forwards, and go to the movies and dinners and coffeeshops and book-readings with, at the end of every long workweek that is done), but there’s a need to convince oneself that my way of life works for me. Does it, now, does it - really?? I heard loneliness takes more lives annually than cardiac arrests, and you thought I was just paranoid for no reason at all? Could it also be that all ye who read me are in your early or mid 20s, still the age where magic stands a fair shot, where razor-sharp mirror edges can cut across jaded views of life, and you are still “wanted/eligible” or any of those words by young nubile sweet somethings. As for me? I am all of 32 and going on 94. Is there hope for me, I hear you giggling.