She's peachy, though

I finished my adolescence to the books of Richard Bach, homespun spirituality. To me, finding a copy of Illusions for a dollar in the back of a Goodwill, it was a revelation. (I cannot imagine why I bothered to pick a book subtitled "The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah," as I was not and am not Christian.)

I haven't read all his books, since I do not care much about marmots flying airplanes. I barely care about a seagull, his best-known work that I took to be smarmy satire, which most people take at face value.

The one that stayed with me most was The Bridge Across Forever. During a long spate of unspiritual and disconnected sex with strangers as he floated through life, he realized that he ought to be in love with his best friend, the actress Leslie Parrish. Looking at her, he seems to have had some level of face blindness that he didn't realize she was the best prospect. He screws it up. He loses her, as someone in a romantic comedy might. He gets her back. He goes bankrupt and must fight to rescue the copyrights to his previous books while living in a trailer. Their love prospers. They marry, making her his second wife. It seems true and encouraging. Soulmates existed and he found his. We would all do well to believe.

As a teenager, I wanted a soulmate, though I was more inclined toward serial monogamy because I wasn't satisfied. I didn't sleep around, but I kissed too freely. I looked to Richard and Leslie and I felt small hope.

He stayed with Leslie for twenty-two years - no small feat - before, as I've heard it, ditching her for a much younger fan. I felt betrayed that he would toss away true love for some floozy - though I have no evidence that Sabryna Nelson-Alexopoulos was any such thing. Didn't he owe me a longer happy ending before succumbing to the throes of a mid-life crisis?

Amber and I have an associate with whom we grew more distant once her partner informed us of their breakup. Our associate had left her to be with someone else. We had invested ourselves in the warmth and goodness of their relationship. Any excuse to end it would not have satisfied us, but this rankled us. If she could do this, anyone could.

We felt an ownership over the loves of others because they reflect what we want for ourselves. It is not justified because people's paths take them in different directions from time to time. It isn't always, or often, fair from the outside, but it is natural. They are not our mirrors.

Several of my friends expressed a similar sentiment when Emily left me. As I was the aggrieved party, they felt the liberty to tell me that they had pinned vicarious relief in the two of us I disappointed by letting her leave.

In retrospect, of course Emily and I were not going to work out, even before she fell for someone else. That we lasted as long as we did was at least partially attributable to the momentum we built up having spent so long together. That was not the face the world saw. They didn't witness the resentment, taking things out on one another. I couldn't bring myself to tell people about fights and hurt, at least not in a way they could hear. Some people near me understood before I did that this relationship had become a mistake. We loved one another almost as best we could. We liked being the admired and envied couple among our friends because we usually got along so well.

Some friends drifted from me because because they wanted us together no matter whether we were happy. The idea of us as a couple outweighed the reality of me as a person.

I do not think I had any other relationship that most of the people around me wanted to persist, before Amber. When I was in college, my relationship ended as college relationships are meant to. No one seemed to believe my relationship with Melanie, a queer girl at a private college eight years my junior, was going to amount to much. That we stayed together until just before graduation was near the best that could be expected. The only one who expressed that I should fight for her was Melissa, who was projecting wildly in a bipolar mess. She had abused and estranged Stevehen to make him prove he loved her. Thus, she couldn't accept that I would let go of a woman who assured me she was a lesbian. She left my apartment that night not of her own volition but under the direction of police, after threatening to kill herself when I did not agree with her.

As warm as the notion of having a relationship others envied made me, it isn't fair to project. It was likewise not fair of me to project on an author who didn't manage to keep his soulmate until one of them died so to end the story beautifully. That is the part of it, that these endings give real conclusions to the story rather than theatrical ones.

Soon in Xenology: Writing. The End of the World.

last watched: American Horror Story: Apocalypse
reading: Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates