It’s always the same story.
As old as the hills and still as new as a day if you think it’ll never happen to you – which obviously everybody always thinks.
Humans are so predictable.
And so.
Once upon a time, in a beautiful night of a beautiful Summer of a leap year, a brown-eyed guy – a married brown-eyed guy – comes your way, uninvited, just to make a big mess out of your whole life, unauthorised.
In fact, you’ve never even talked to married men before; you try hard not to, but you end up crashing in love with this one.
You hate that.
You hate that love has chosen you without your permission.
Technically, you are not supposed to feel like a mistress because the guy is already in the divorce negotiations and because he goes public with the relationship from day one and also because everybody strictly involved – including his brothers and sisters – support the affair.
Affair, what a word.
Invented in the midst of time by some cheated wife who needed a word to describe what it couldn’t possibly have been love without her permission, because love has always had to be ruled by law to keep this distasteful world in order.
Then, 149 days later, 149 days you’ll still never regret in another million years, 149 days after you first looked into his damn brown eyes as if you hadn’t looked into any other eyes on earth before, what everybody but you had predicted from the beginning happens.
It’s all too crowded as Lady Diana would say, and he ends up breaking your heart in two.
And then your life passes before your eyes in a second and you remember a quote from Eat Pray Love when David tells Liz:
What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? And then we could spend our lives together – in misery, but happy to not be apart.
And so no, you won’t spend your bloody life in misery not to feel the addiction.
Not again.
Not with this one.
Not with the one you thought was the one.
You won’t sit to see the two of you turning into them.
Into an affair.
You get so miserable and skinny you feel you’re going to die.
You don’t die, you don’t insist, you don’t discuss, you don’t even cry your heart out because you don’t feel you have a heart anymore.
You break up with him and go back to your life as if he never existed.
After all, 149 days weren’t 149 years – after all, you’d just met and you could forget him.
After all, all the women who used to blame you for being a mistress are now disapproving you for not being the mistress anymore, dumping him and breaking his heart in two.
So yes you realise that your ex will now have a plethora of little candy-stripers to comfort him and that no, female friendship doesn’t exist.
It’s funny, in a way.
People accuse you of doing something they consider completely wrong and then they blame you for stopping, and this always makes me think about another story, this time a work-related one.
We’re all good at spotting a dysfunctional relationship when we see one – provided it’s not our relationship, of course – we all claim to know the difference between right and wrong, we repeat that violence and abusive behaviour should not be tolerated in any form in our personal life… but do we set the same strict limits in our working environments?
We get jobs where we’re surrounded by idiots, we accept crazy shifts and low pays and our company to put the nose in our personal and family life.
We call for the Government to determine the extent of the psychological abuse we can accept, what should be considered mobbing and harassment and what shouldn’t.
Actually, we accept just anything from our employers on account for jobs we don’t even like in companies campaigning for values we don’t believe in.
We always have.
We’ve needed labour revolts and strikes to try to get our rights right.
But the man, all the men that have smashed your heart into smithereens have left yourself broken, not empty.
Because when there has been so much love and happiness for someone – the truth is – they will stay in your heart forever.
But what do you have left inside when you finally get rid of a job after it has sucked the whole life out of you?
I tell you: nothing at all.
And you’ll most probably have not learned anything about yourself, so there’s not a single thing that will stay in your heart forever.
And you can try and fix something that’s broken, but not something that’s missing.
Remember the last sentence in the saddest movie ever, Ghost?
At the end of the film, when Sam is dead and is about to go to Heaven, he tells his fiancé Molly:
It’s amazing, Molly. The love inside, you take it with you.
You see, he says the love.
Not the office.
© The Shortlisted – 2019
from The Shortlisted https://ift.tt/2ry49mC
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