When I was a little girl, I believed in Prince
Charming. Or maybe I really wanted to
believe in Prince Charming. A lot. I did all those things that little girls who
believe in fairytales do. I looked at
pictures of women in beautiful white dresses with long, wispy vales. I envisioned a handsome man holding my hand
while we walked, with bare, sandy feet, chasing a brilliant sunset down an
exotic beach. I chose the names of my
four future children. There was a time
when I wanted a fairytale. At least I
thought I wanted a one. But looking back
on those adolescent fantasies, I don’t know if I was ever really committed to
them. Not to the dress or the beach or
the children or even the prince. I
remember wanting it all really badly, but I also wanted to be a lawyer. Or a cruise ship captain. Or a peacock rancher.
Obviously, I have traveled a very long and treacherous road
since those innocent, childhood day dreams.
I’ve given up on most of that stuff.
Except becoming a peacock rancher.
I kinda still want that. But I
hear they are really mean birds and my feelings get hurt really easily. So, maybe that’s out, too. Anyway, as I grew older, I also grew more
cynical. I don’t think it was
intentional. I just thinks that’s what
too much reality does to unsubstantiated idealism. And that brings us to now, or at least the
last several years.
I advertise myself pretty freely as a bitter and apathetic
spinster. I have no qualms with the cats
and the kids and the wayward sisters who roam my house and my yard at their leisure.
I have no secrets about the men who
periodically make appearances in my life.
I admit, without prompting, that sex has largely been a disappointment. That’s probably a huge part of the reason I
hold so many former lovers in contempt.
Not only did they prove to be emotional degenerates, they couldn’t make
an orgasm happen with a magical sex wand.
(Which, by the by, I have several of.
And they work just fine.)
For years, I was forced to suffer the anguish that
accompanied well-meaning encouragement from people who love me. I was forced to listen to cliché reassurance
from people who wanted me to be happy.
My friends would say things like “Oh Angela. Just wait.
Happiness awaits you!” Or “I didn’t
meet my Prince until I was much older than you.
Hang in there!” Or, one of my
personal favorites “One day someone is going to treat you the way you deserve
to be treated!” Encouragement is excruciating
when all you want is to be haggard and scorned.
And God fucking forbid, that in a jaded moment of forced hopefulness,
you actually believe them. Because the
only thing that gets you is a ticket to the Mediterranean to see a man who
should have told you not to buy the ticket in the first place. That’s even more excruciating.
While I eventually learned to appreciate what the lovely
people around me were trying to say, I got tired of it. I would never have told them that. Because you can’t tell people who love you to
go sell Cinderella to someone else. It
makes you seem hostile and unappreciative.
But, secretly, I was hostile and unappreciative. I
began to form an alliance of women who shared my disdain for the false representation
of romance and the bullshit that people in committed relationships try to sell
to those who are not.
It was in that alliance, that I found one of my most sacred
resources; one of the most powerful voices.
A young woman who I shared all of my secrets with. A young woman who shared all of her secrets
with me. We didn’t necessarily approach
the life and love the same way, but that never deterred us from sharing with
each other. For years she would tell me “If
you wanna win with men, you have to play the game.” I would always respond with “If a man want’s
to play a game, he can get an Xbox.” Even
though we didn’t share all of the same ideals, we had no problem sharing all of
our souls with each other.
Then today happened. As
I talked to my little soul sister for a while, I listened as she told me that
she had finally resigned to the fact that she was in love. She said “I know we are in love because neither
one of us needs to prove who cares less.
We both want to care more.”
There was that minute in my head that everything shook and
nothing seemed clear. There was no way
that my little sister just told me that she wasn’t going to play games
anymore. There was no way that she had
found a man who didn’t want to play games with her. I could have sworn that if love was a game,
Rach would have been playing it forever.
Or at least until she won. So, basically forever. But instead, she proved to me
that the only way to win at life and love is to care more.
-Inner Peas
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