Previous ||| Next
Live And Let Die
I once met the other man, he wasn't what I had expected. In my head I had conjured up someone with better hair, better teeth, better dress sense than me. Someone who was funny and intelligent and everyone's best friend. He turned out to be a lot like me. I never understood why the other guy would be just like me. The next time I met the other guy he had terrible hair and I felt much better about myself, I likened him to a pencil-topper troll.
Years later my parents seperated and I got to meet the other woman; she was just like my mother. Again I found myself watching and recognising all the similarities between her and my mother and I couldn't fathom why you would leave someone for someone exactly the same. Everything this woman was my mother had been and had done it better, or at least so it seemed to me.
It took a long time for me to realise that I had been looking at the whole process as if there was a single unchanging factor in the equation; the person being left behind. It hadn't occured to me that I had changed, or my mother had changed, or everyone was constantly changing, to my eyes I was always me.
And then one day I was the other fella, I was put into the very situation I had demonised and I found myself face to face with someone who, again, was just like me, was just as normal, just as screwed up, just as funny, just as witty, different and yet the same, now on the opposite side of the mirror.
I learned a very important thing in that short space of time, something I can't put into words, but the image in my head is of thousands of baby crabs clambering out of a hole filled with sinking sands. Sometimes you clamber over one of your brothers or sisters, sometimes you pull one up behind you by the claw, but we're always just beneath the lip of the hole and even those at the top can't get over it.
I'll bet that mental image has brightened your morning.
May.11.2007