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LEARNING TO LOVE

By Deborah Forster

WHEN I think of love I see green. See the comfort of long love. See the sharing of the years, all based on those swamping, spreading feelings. You don't bargain for it, you can't plan for, it either happens or it doesn't. Nothing will make it happen.
Why do we all crave it so? There is a good life to be had living on your own. The only mess you clean up is your own. The only heart you worry about is your own. There is much to recommend it. Still, I think it would be boring.

We learn so much about ourselves from others - tolerance and compassion. And, besides, you get someone to bring you cups of tea and ask how you are. You get a shoulder to lean on. Then there are the other parts of love, the tiger feelings of protection, the friendship. Without them, life would be a plane, the acres spreading to the sky, still as a desert.
Still, loving makes us vulnerable. Love someone and you offer your heart. It takes time to learn who to offer it to, it takes time to trust.

When I was first in love I wanted to enter that state of blending and meshing, the complete integration of personalities. I called it bleshing, which l got from a book l was absorbing then. In time, I understood that bleshing is not possible, mainly because it's such a crazy, lazy notion. It took me a long time to abandon that one, to move from the infantile searching for a replacement mother.. to see those I love as individuals, not mirrors.

I suppose I've always leaned towards infatuation rather than love. Love is complicated. Infatuation is imagination. You can imagine movie-star loves, say Robert Redford or Harrison Ford or Coim Firth. That's easy. Something's going on now, though, because I find myself fancying Tubby Taylor, even the way his tummy moves when he bats. My imagination is moving home - either that or it's been winged.
When I was nine a boy gave me a flower. It was a full-blown rose he'd ripped from a bush. He was on his bike. He stopped outside my old house calling and when I came out , he thrust it at me over the fence and pedalled away. I stood looking into the disc of rose. It wasn't Valentine's Day. I was alarmed but it was all right, he never said another thing about it but he was always very polite and on the monkey bars, made a space.

Like most teenagers, I was a victim of those engulfing feelings of uncertainty. There were boys I liked but silence ruled me, all to do with anxiery about self-worth. I remember walkinghome from school and the boy next door walked along beside me and tried to talk. Captured by fear, I answered in monosyllables staring straight ahead. After a while he asked me why my cheeks moved so much when [ walked, which was a low blow, but I had to smile We ended up friends,though, and would hand copies of The Daily PIanet, our favorite teen newspaper, over the back fence. I did spy on him a bit through the fence, too, I will admit, stirred by his beaty.
There was another, with eyes like leaves, who I thought I truly, madly, deeply loved for four years. I did not speak more than 10 words to him over those years and he had no notion of the strength of my feelings, which was such a good thing. Still, I wonder what it was all about.

So another Valentines Day... thousands of red roses consumed in the name of love. People proposing to each other, proposing forever to each other. Standing on mountains, by the sea, blowing all their money on fancy restaurants,dreaming big dreams, seeking comfort in each other, a harbour, a haven. They hold out their futures to each other. Good luck, young lovers, but does it ever turn out the way we plan? Does anything?

These late summer days, full of high cloud, the last of the roses, days of thunder, nights of rain, remind me that for all the loves I've ever had. or thought I had, for all the pain they've caused me or me them, time is a balm. You move on. You don't forget.

Article written for The Age , February 13th, 1998.


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