Just Checking the Spark Plugs

"You're sick," Luke declares over dinner at Follow Your Heart. "You're still thinking about that guy?"

My suddenly ruddier complexion offering answer enough for anyone with decent vision, I made my words brief, kept the details to a minimum.

The next day, that of my departure, I had a pre-Paris Sabrina moment in the kitchen. Instead of aiming for asphyxiation in a ten-car garage, I simply imagined what my mother would think if I happened to drop dead while preparing another forgettable salad, what Luke's future might hold, and if the boy would ever find out. I considered if, much like workers whose corporate employers have secretly taken life insurance policies out on them, I am worth more dead than alive. I further considered the brutality of the world, how it has sculpted me into finer and finer delicacy, one that makes me more and more unfit for normal interaction. I forgave myself for these thoughts and finished packing.



Dr. Laura provided the background noise for our ride to the airport, courtesy of my mother. I made a cognitive effort to listen more carefully when she explained that single people are even less content than married couples with problems. Throwing that into the equation with information I had recently gathered about the positive correlation of longevity and social vibrance, my heart sank.

We crossed the ocean. The airline had neglected to make a note of our dietary preferences, which were properly registered in a timely manner, and, in this mode of starvation, I found it difficult to sleep. I ended up watching movies where the lovesick protagonists, of course, get their girls in the end.

Alas, I am no one's girl. And I don't want to be. Not just anyone's, I mean.

A walking tour of Montmartre this morning brought us to the bust of Dalida, France's most treasured pop singer. As our guide explained her unhappiness, I felt a karmic resonance with the statue and its story. She was wildly successful and most cherished by her country, but life for her was far from perfect. Apparently, two of her husbands killed themselves, and she ended up killing herself as well. A string of devastation.

If there are such things as past lives, maybe I had a semi-miserable one like that. Having said that, the present intersections are potent, too. If I am lucky, I will enjoy avalanches of success achieved through perfect self-expression, yet looming is this fear of romantic disappointment.

You see, I have not yet met anyone like last year's boy, and I sincerely doubt the existence of someone better suited for me. The only possibility I currently see is that, out of sheer vanity and practicality, I may one day settle for someone who is not my ideal, so that I may preserve my youth and be more content than I would otherwise be in my solitude.

What a sorry state to enter! To realize someone else's dream while my own goes on unmanifested: truly unacceptable. Mine is the less common goal, methinks: it is all about loving and not so much about being loved. I am not looking for validation. I have enjoyed plenty of male attention, the compliments, invitations, confessions, etc., but I care not for it because I can learn to love anyone, history has shown: the mean, the petty, the vulgar, and even the soul-less, but, when they were done with me, I realized that I hadn't felt the stirrings of romantic passion in the first place. I had only grown to appreciate the little my comrades were revealing. As I proceeded in unconditional love, my love objects grew increasingly unappreciative of what I had always clearly been.

If man's aim is to discard me, then I should at least get to feel something vital and powerful in the beginning. Anything else seems tiresome and wasteful. I want shimmer. I want sparkle.

It is useless to tell me to get over it already when I'm not. The inquisitive, exquisite, handsome, charming, and brilliant men are hard to come by these days. I'm no fool. I would rather accept, for the time being, the dramatic notion that my one true love, like Morgaine's in The Mists of Avalon, was stolen from me, the saga a petri dish on which to culture my talents and my truth.

Thus I've assumed a radical policy of that truth, and it hasn't earned me any new friends. When it comes up, and it always does, I let boys know that I will not be friends with them if they like me more than that, as I am already very much in love--with a ghost, as it may be. It's harsh, but it's for the best. It hurt to have my heart dangling in front of someone, and I will not have any such hearts before me.

Maybe I'm sick like Luke says, but if I am, I'd like to think that I am perfectly sick, as Dalida sings in "Je Suis Malade." If it is quixotic to love pure and chaste from afar, pointless to love in purgatory, ludicrous to love perfectly without the prospect of any return, then I am down for the count.

Maybe one day a certain Linus Larrabee will rescue my inner Sabrina from her fixation on his cad of a brother, thereby setting off nuclear sparkles within me. That is the only acceptable course, really, as love, for me, has to be atomic. Until then, don't be surprised if you find me turning on the ignition of every car in the garage from time to time, coughing, choking, eyes searching for meaning in the mustiness and the metal, not sincerely wanting this way but knowing no other in that moment, but rest assured that, when the door is flung open, I will claim quite casually that I was "just checking the spark plugs."