Dating : MAN I LOVE YOU

I know you! You’re the man who always sits next to the hostess at dinner parties. She likes you because you are good looking and charming. You are easy to talk to, she thinks you are in touch with your feminine side and can talk about the things she likes talking about, children, what to plant in the garden or what colour to paint the kitchen. You know the drill and understand her problems. You are so much nicer than her husband who doesn’t understand anything at all and never talks to her unless it is to ask her to do some boring thing while he swans off to work.

What she doesn’t know is that you CAN’T talk to YOUR wife. You see her now having one too many glasses of wine. She is starting to talk a little too loudly, frankly it is a bit embarrassing. You have had your two glasses of wine which made you feel slightly more relaxed but you have now gone on to water and as the clock creeps towards midnight you get up to make your excuses — the baby sitter needs to be taken home. Your wife is cross, she wants to stay but you politely with a smile fixed to your face, insist.

And off you go. You are driving, she falls asleep. GOD, that meeting tomorrow with the new client. You have to get them on board otherwise it will look very bad for you. That young chap who is supposed to be junior to you has brought in twice as much business as you in the last 6 months. You can’t afford to lose your job. You have a large mortgage on your six-bedroom farmhouse conveniently situated near the station so that you can commute. You remember wistfully the days before you had the children when you were first married and you had a three quarter of an hour commute to work from Putney. It was all so easy back then.

Anyway, what your hostess did not realise when she was chatting idly to you at dinner, is that as much as she may think you have it all together, actually tonight at about 2.00am that little boy who got lost somewhere between 8 years old and now will wake up and he will wake you up. He is lonely lost and alone. He has no one to turn to and no one to talk to. No one who can understand how he is feeling. He knows that he is loved somewhere by someone but he is not sure who it is and where they are. He wishes he could find them and sit down peacefully with them and pass the time of day, without having to be and do what is expected. He will keep you awake for a couple of hours and then let you drift into a shallow sleep for an hour before your alarm rudely announces that it is time to get up and put on the suit and tie and bury the little boy deep, deep inside you where no one can see him, not even you.

What happened to you? Where did the little boy go? Do you remember the times when you were carefree and a hero? I remember those times. Your blonde hair always slipping into your eyes and your protests at your mother’s large kitchen scissors as they ruthlessly chopped the golden curls dumping them on the bathroom floor. Your laughter as you chased the dogs around the garden and your shouts of glee as you swooped, limbs flying onto your unsuspecting sister in a very ungainly and ungallant rugby tackle.

I remember too, your sleepy smile as you loved to listen to the calm voice of your father as he read to you from your favourite adventure story, sending you off to sleep with dreams of swords and battles, fishing boats and high seas. Your delighted pleasure at waking in the morning, to a new day of enormous adventure. Your kindness and joy in life was so charming and ensnaring.

I can clearly recall the pain of adolescence as you were becoming aware of life and its dawning possibility of more responsibility. Your realisation that as you grow to adulthood there would be duty and burden. That the boyhood dreams and fantasies were just that and you started to anticipate and await a more serious life. A life with a wife and family and job. You had dreams of success and money. You became eager to get on with being a man.

What seemed odd to me at the time was how resolute you became. How the charming smile turned into a more restrained grin, the laughter turned to an occasional chuckle and the shouts of joy turned to a quiet way of speaking that disturbed no-one. The sense that you were restructuring yourself to fit into the box of adulthood was quite claustrophobic to watch. I had to leave your life then. I could not bear to watch as you turned yourself into every other man that I had ever known.

As for me, I have been travelling. I have seen many things. I have been to the rainforest and lived a simple yet enriched life. I have lived in humble dwellings and made friends with happy people who have nothing. I have learnt different religions and have spent long hours alone in thought and peace. I have been trying to come to terms with life. I have been searching for a meaning to all of this. I have at times felt that there is nothing inside me and nothing worthwhile in the world. At other times I have been so overwhelmed with joy at the wonders of the earth I have climbed to the highest mountain just to be able to shout into the wind all my secret hopes and dreams. I have loved and hated. I have felt despair and elation. I have tried to live.

Through all of it there was a pulse beating in me. A pulse that would never let me truly forget the one thing in my life that I could not have. The thing that I craved more than anything but that I knew was totally out of my reach. I will tell you but if I do, please do not judge me — I have loved you, through all of my experiences I have loved and wanted you. You have been with me in everything and everywhere. On the snow caps and in the humid, hot valleys. In the deserts and in the lush green forests. Everywhere I have been, you have been there too, in my heart and in my head. Always my hero. Unswerving and unflinching, strong and buoyant. Yet I have known that you are unattainable. You are in a different dimension and I will never be part of your world.

So now I am here with you. I know you better maybe than you know yourself. It makes me sad. You are so changed, your hair is starting to grey at the temples and you skin has lost the shine of youth. Your cheeks are a little sunken and your eyes seem dull, changed, sad. And still as you smile, I see the twinkle and I see the buried memory of something that was once so good and true. A friendship you had forgotten. You had forgotten all about me. You had forgotten because it would be too painful to remember. You cannot allow yourself to remember.

I am leaving now. I will quit your life again. I will not laugh with you again or hug you or smile secretly at shared jokes. It is all gone and I will leave you to the life you have carved out for yourself. You have chosen something I could never chose. You have chosen to fit in and be part of a gang. The gang is very civilised, it does not ever make any waves. The sea is calm and it must remain so at all costs.

As I leave you, I leave behind part of my heart. The raw emotions that I have felt and have become too much for me to bear will stay here with you. I will leave it all with you in the hope that you will waken your soul and you will find again the boy who could shout and leap and laugh. I will be on top of my mountain or in my valley, if you care to join me you are welcome but the secret password is “love” and unless you know how to say that you cannot find the way. Everything I have been and done has taught me that the one true way in life is love. It does not necessarily bring peace but it brings life and life is experience. If we cannot access experiences and feel and be we are lost. We lose the richness of being alive. We live a half-life and that is not for me. I am alive and I love it with all the pain and joy that it brings.