• July 10, 2011
  • Georgia Keighery
  • Guest

Stalker Marries Object of Desire; and still I’m alone

There is more true love out there than I thought.

Actually, just – true love is out there… it actually is, truly.

My wearied (well before its years) heart secretly believed, cloistered beneath feigned hopefulnesses, that true love was dead. Or at least that it was defunct; sprawling finless; bobbing weightless; been abandoned years ago, flung damp into the linty laundry corner, developing an irreversible wet-dry stench. Not to mention the collected fluff ’n’ hairs.

But I was wrong.

This is where the sneak peak into the souly guts of my softest pink fleshed vulnerability begins. But before I do that, perhaps I should offer a disclaimer. A ‘before’ for the ‘after’, to really boost the impact of the latter.

Disclaimer: Not openly hardened to true love, I was the worst kind. Like the devil’s best disguise; I might have seemed a happy vessel of faith, but instead inside a passive aggressive faithlessness multiplied cells at a terrible rate, and me looking out onto the world like Arnie, with cool eyes ever more convinced, churning the thought – “Humpf. Idiots. True love = make believe”.

I’m not disclaiming to be witty, god knows, or to set up the premise of my own ‘can you believe how far I’ve come’ journey story. I’m disclaiming because I want you to know I did really doubt, truly.

Remember this.

Now back to the soft pink squishiness…

It seems in my case the Universe knew, to crack this hard-case (my case) it’d have to pull out the big guns, the WMD’s, if it were to shift me. Or possibly that’s bullshit. Really all it was was an unsystematic series of concurrent encounters, whose cumulative effect just happened to be some kind of epiphany for little old me.

True love. It brushed past me in an alley, stared me in the face, smashed straight through my flimsy coconut shell chest-guard of skepticism, and with invisible fingers groped into my very middle and tickled teasingly my aforementioned wearied heart.

This isn’t what you think. This isn’t my true love story.

And maybe I did force fate a little, by placing myself in the business of marrying people. It was a complex decision. This thing to marry. One whose motivation I’ve found very hard to disclose to the outside world. Because it was at once an act of defiant-ism; Rasputin among the pigeons; anti-frou-frou among the meringues; and an act of hope, innocent girlish hope, that it could be found. That maybe for all these poor suckers, if I squeezed my eye lids hard enough and clicked my heels fervently, gave the very best I’ve got, implored for their best, I really could bake them up something that would come as close, as was worldly possible, to this dream, this probable delusion. The golden fleece; love true; found, expressed, and cemented.

Then the first punch got me, almost straight away and totally unawares, right on the edge of my jaw. And as I fell, the spit cascading slow-mo Rottweiler style from my gob, I saw them. There they were in front of me. Jiminy Cricket and his Mrs Jiminy-Cricket-to-be. Angels, apparitions, or maybe ghosts of Christmas past, sent to set this love-Scrooge straight.

The punch I mentioned was figurative, and it was to my guts as much as to my chin.

For these two were … bloody lovely.

Their loveliness was infectious. It had a calm assuredness that seemed to be woven of that same stuff that makes up bullet-proof vests or block-out shutters. There was something astounding about how considerate they were, not because they were pussies, but because they got it. They got each other. The stark contrasts to my own scenario lapped at my ankles, rising like a tide of grey watery run-off.

As they continued in their unwitting wonderfulness, it rose, eventually lapping its stenchiness into my mouth. Me smiling on the outside, while gulping, spluttering, and flailing like a fat child without my floaties on the inside. “ ‘elp! ‘elp!”. The sharp cognition of this moment instantly split into two equally sharp and contrasting dualities, and will stay with me for a very long time. My dormant girlish hope fluttered, as my heart filled with appreciation for these two, and with puppy wonder, at having just had contact with, perhaps, for the very first time – true love. Then in this very same moment my heart shriveled and cried. It emptied of blood and tried to hold itself. In the stark reality, the fluros in my heart flickered on, causing squints and blinks, showing up the blemish, wrinkle and un-mending scares of my own love. The best love I had known had been dying slowly in the corner, and now I faced it. My heart finally excepted it had never been true.

But this isn’t about me – in that way.

So, after this encounter, slightly won over, but still determinedly renegade I have thus thrust and been thrust, occupationally so, into plenty dens of love since. In the vast lovescape, there are three further interactions that fated me to my eventual revelation. Actually four. There’s the two international true loves. One set bonding over obscure metaphysical poets and licorice like Sandra Dee and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (talking characters here not real life sexual persuasions), thanking their lucky fucking stars for the w.w.w.wonders of modern technology. Without it the tragedy of their unloved and unappreciated selves would have been acute, as they stared out bedroom windows, from the Sutherland Shire and Port Glasgow respectively, into the stars, wondering if alone will ever go away.

The other International lovers, whose success coincidentally also depended on the w.w.w.wonders of modern technology, social media-ly so, saw the diligent female of the set, track down her alcohol-induced-periodic-Alzheimer’s suffering hung over lover, with nothing more to go on than an obscure band t-shirt, saving him from his An Affair to Remember style searching, as he looked for her, crying, listless, and pathetic, roaming foreign European streets.

The thing is, both of these couples braved the whole world for each other, and you can see the stoic, unwavering resolve in their eyes – this is their golden fleece and they aint giving it up for quids.

But it was these next two that really did it to me. The first is actually about second chances. The second is about never ever giving up, even with the threat of AVO’s.

The more cynical amongst us might be quick to judge those who have been married before. That somehow the grit of their second attempt is lessened, because they’ve had their chance and blown it.

Oh how wrong.

After this next true love rubbed my face in it, I can tell you – there is nothing more distilled, more concentrated or pure than the deliberate and considered love of those once bitten. With clear eyes blazing he said “I’ve found the one to tear this world apart with me. I may have been married before, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know love until this person”. And so I realised, maybe opportunity wasn’t wasted the first time, but made the best of, then life floated over his second chance but first love, what was he to do but grab it and hold on?

My final solidifier is more personal, a dear friend, and thus I have the benefit of a detailed chronology of his stalkerishness. I am the first to admit, after two solid years of lady rejection I warned him to back off. But heed me nor anyone else did he. His conviction was clear. Psychotically so. He knew, he kept saying, that they were meant to be. In his defense she had shown some interest in the past, so it wasn’t out ‘n’ out Jodie Foster. But it had got embarrassing, uncomfortable, and yet he still wooed.

Then… it worked.

She relented, caved, succumbed.

But it wasn’t for pity’s sake. It was as if this constant love onslaught from him had caused two years of secret plugged adoration from her, and finally as the dam walls burst what came gushing unto him was a love as boundless and red and deep and luscious as his own.

They are married now.

And little old me? Alone now.

True love and I are better friends though, not bedfellows, but my bedside manner is much improved.

Anyway serves me right I’m alone. It’s karma. I didn’t believe. The stalker never stopped. Believing.

Faith is a very interesting thing.

Don’t worry, I’ll get there in the end.

 

 

Written by George Peach.

 

Find out more about George Peach here:

http://thequeenofhearts.com.au/

Check out George on the Guest page

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