Six feet from the edge and thinking

It’s a story I’ve heard before.

Same silly girl who loved a lying boy. Same happy beginning, same bitter end. Same torn-up families, children like snapshot pieces scattered on the floor; used to hurt each other, but ending up the most hurt themselves.

Same friends who comfort, console, condemn. Same words falling like burning pitch from an overflowing mouth – too painful to swallow, but the hurt already done.

“I trusted him.”

“He lied to me, all these years.”

“After all I’ve done.”

“I don’t care, I’ll get him, I’ll take the children and he’ll never see them again.”

Steady words with rising anger and a slowly building cynical edge.

Sometimes even a little bewildered in the pain, “He said he loved me.”

Clichés that don’t mean any less for their having been said a thousand times before.

And so they live again, and again and again as new “bedtime stories” – but only for the daughters.

“Never trust a man.”

“He lied to her, all those years.”

“After all she’d done.”

“Now she’s going to leave him and take the children, now her life will be so much harder.”

The most cynical of tones, “He said he loved her.”

Round and round and round it goes, tales of tales told, only the names are different; the lies and lives the same.

And every well-meant fable is one too many, because it’s getting easier to listen to, and worse, easier to believe.

To believe that this could happen to me is not the problem; I’m afraid that one day I’ll believe it will.

Surely going around believing that, given the opportunity, Boyfriend will become just another in a list of oft-sung songs is not the way to live. It matters not that he has never given me cause to believe he will, because, hey, all those girls said they hadn’t seen it coming either!

It used to be effortless, once, to take the high road and declare that I would not be one of them – the watchful, wary, wily women who slyly trapped their men in nets of careful guarding that they didn’t even notice. No, I would trust in mine, I would treat him as I wanted to be treated – with openness and honesty and respect.

But the spiky fables will not cease their nagging, prodding me to depths of insecurity, and heights of distrust I’d never known.

Is this the way it should be, then? Love no longer blind, but hawk-eyed? Trust not a feeling, but a piece of signed paper with ugly words, but pretty numbers? Forever not for ever, just as long as I can make it so?

Don’t mistake me; it’s not arrogance. I don’t think myself, or Boyfriend, better or worse than any other person out there, I don’t think what we have is “divine” or that it “transcends the ordinary”. I don’t think that “no one else has ever felt this way”.

In fact, I’m positive almost everyone has felt this way. The quiet comfort of not hiding who you are. The happy thoughts about the future. The proverbial rose-tinted glasses you cannot help but wear.

But to have a future at all, a happy one, it seems that it is all this I must give up. I must be clear-sighted, hard-hearted, and calculative. Love is just the beginning of a protracted secret war fought only on one side.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost?

‘Tis better to never lose than to love with all of you.

Is this worth it?