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Have we met and what did we do in the future?
[ 5 minute read ]
What chapter are you on?
It seems I am a ghost or a zombie and quieter than a cat. Sally, my next door neighbour, was cutting her hedge and didn't notice me when I walked up to her, bare-footed, with a handful of strawberries for her. The look of horror on her face will stay with me for a long time; probably the whole weekend. What did she expect after she jumped out of her skin?
We just stood there, staring at each other; she with shears in her hands and me with my right arm extended as though I wanted a fist-bump. Eventually, she placed one open palm under my fist and I released the strawberries. I wouldn't say there was a sense of relief but I would also say I felt a change in her. She didn't smile and thank me; she, instead, turned away and started walking towards her front door; not a word. I told her, to her retreating back, about the damp and mould experts who visited me in the week. She smiled then.
It puzzles me.
In a fantasy medieval world, I might have been paying a token amount for entry into her secret areas:
'This is the last time, Martin. I know you serve the community well and I suppose I can contribute to the goodwill we all want to offer you, but I am a good Christian and I have only myself and sanctuary in my home to give. You know I live frugally.'
On a spiritual plane, we might have once met before and she thought she had killed me but I am alive or re-incarnated:
'I see I was not ruthless enough, and left off from drowning you too soon, and I have failed to suppress your force long enough to make it last. What now?' She walked away in silent resignation.
She was alarmed! Both of those imagined scenarios are steeped in resignation, aren't they. Yet, she might have simply been confused. How did I manage to suddenly appear next to her when she is convinced her hearing is so acute that she can hear the hedgehogs munching outside with the noise passing through double-glazing, and she is woken by her cat walking towards her bed?
Of course, Sally has a very loving cat and I know Sally is affectionate and caring. I am pretty certain that her cat recognises the change in Sally's breathing as she starts to wake up and pads across the floor towards her for a cuddle. Hearing hedgehogs is a bit of a mystery to me though. I am no expert but a passing car is pretty loud and cannot really penetrate the double-glazing. Maybe, Sally leans out of her window and listens.
It doesn't signify. That is an old expression I got from the writer C.S. Forester in his books on Hornblower. Through some kind of magic transmogrification it means 'It doesn't add up' or 'It doesn't make sense as it stands'. Just like Shakespeare wrote in a language that the people of his time could understand, but modern people need a translation book for, it seems that Sally and I speak different languages, or have lived on different planets and now both find ourselves bumping up to one another on Earth.
If Sally and I were reading the same book but separately, I imagine she might have gotten to the pages where we know each other much better and either we are close, as in relaxed in each other's company, or have fallen out for some reason. It isn't hard for me to lazily lean on an old and obsolete notion that she might be, as a woman, absorbing the passion of a story of love and betrayal, while I, on the other hand, stereo-typically, as a man, might be reading the same book but enjoying different parts; the interplay of characters but with a bent towards understanding the function and progression of relationships; work-like, if you will. It is difficult for me to put this notion aside. Of course, this is glaring sexism, even misogyny, by the back door. Yet, I would offer that I have detached emotions and all people are romantic fantasists to me; people who skillfully and silently weave their own lives into stories, with a hope for a future they have already secretly enjoyed.
Sally, is an intelligent woman. I admire her. She is not silly; she is practical. I sometimes think I have had glimpses from the future. Certainly, when I was driving throughout Europe I have had a prescience that there is something blocking the road beyond a blind bend and braked almost to a crawl as I rounded the curve. Yup, loose cows or broken-down vehicle. I think Sally might be a few chapters ahead of me in the same 'book' we are reading. Actually not, she has somehow flicked forward a few pages to read a passage or two and then returned to the 'story' in the right place, where ALL of us are reading. You know, when something is happening in a story and we simply must know the resolution; will they, won't they?
I have had a few relationships, both romantic and platonic, in which there was an expectation that I would fill a role. The classic one in the romance realm is when a long-term relationship breaks down and then, unbeknownst to me that there ever was one, I turn up; perhaps even having been snared by a well-prepared web, and innocently think I am entering a fresh relationship, only to find that it is stale from the outset. I have had to fill the role of a long-term lover, even a married man of many years. It is really sad. I see new relationships as green buds of potential growth that are shaped by the environment and nutrition that the people involved in the relationship give to it. Old relationships, of course, need fertiliser, just as plants and trees do.
I married a woman who had a notion of how we should be. She didn't tell me. The marriage failed after only a year or so, but trundled along for another three years. Her fantasies had advanced our relationship so far that even with a limited amount of prescience I was left only guessing. Truth be known, I never tried to guess or work out what was going on because I was always wrong-footed.
'Why won't you comply with what I imagined you to be like?'
'Why, are you not in the now, without ever having read forward to see what the resolution is in a fantasy novel?'