Earthly Delights

Character sketch

For you-know-who

Once upon a time there was a girl. Since her parents divorced when she was 9, her conception of love came mostly from books and somewhat from movies and TV. She was a dreamer and a Romantic (a lover of nature, of beauty, and of Love); something of a loner, she spent many hours building castles in the air, and the rest of the time she spent building something rather more complex: herself. She imagined that, in order to find True Love (this being, she had decided long before she was a teenager, the reason for her existence), she would have to be Perfect. What Perfect meant, of course, was less clear. Role models were fairytale princesses and Scarlett O’Hara. The former model was simple: one must just be three things: divinely beautiful, dazzlingly clever and angelically good. The latter sowed some confusion, since it led to the idea that being desired by many would automatically mean that she was loved (this, of course, was the same mistake Scarlett made. No wonder it took years for the girl to realize that S. ended up completely alone). In any case, of course, this led to a lot of heartbreak, because: 1. She absolutely refused to settle for anything less than True Love; 2. She believed that True Love would come in the form of the boy she liked at the moment liking her back, which, of course, never happened: boys of her age were hardly interested in finding the love of their lives, and her model of perfection was wanting—being “angelically good” and “dazzlingly clever” had been out of fashion for some time (apart from the obvious impossibility to actually reach those states of perfection; she was just seen as “a pretty, nice, smart girl”--in the best of cases--, which is not bad at all, although, of course, not an easy thing to be, and something of a problem, since, apart from all that, she was also somewhat “peculiar”, “weird”, “complicated”, and not easy to understand at all—which she translated more favorably into “mysterious”), and 3. She thought that whoever her True Love was would realize she was worth loving if as many boys as possible liked her, that is, if she was the subject of desire—she wanted to be some sort of Neoplatonic dream for men. How could her strategy fail? It is a fact that no love came her way except, to her eyes, unnecesary love (from boys she was not interested in), trouble. Lonely lonely years of heartbreak (painful, tragic, silent, tormenting) had to go by before she would actually fall in love, and of course, that was a surprise. But it was well worth waiting for, though more painful than she would have imagined, for when it really happens, it became clear that it was impossible to express that depth of feeling to her love: no words, no gestures, no looks, no touches will ever fully express it. Perfection was understood to be impossible, although to be as close to it as she could humanly get (it is very unlikely that she is even close) was a gift she offered to him. And happily ever after, she came to realize, could only be understood at the end of the story, and who can ever tell when that will come? So, Happily So Far is what we get in life. I suppose it’s good enough.