Anything In Particular, or Cliches: A Love Story

My story begins with a flawed cliché. A faux pas. A belief that in this world there’s one person you meet and fall in love with and the rest of the world becomes a blur. You get married, buy a house, have two and a half kids and rescue the family dog from the local animal shelter. Then, your kids grow up and go off to college; you make more money than you can ever imagine spending on yourself and with each passing day, your worries pass as well. Your children have children, you retire, you celebrate your golden anniversary, and, without warning, you say goodnight to your wife one night and don’t wake up in the morning. Then you reside for eternity in a mahogany box under a marble tombstone featuring a poem by Whitman, or Frost, or cummings, surrounded by fresh flowers and watering eyes. I wanted to believe this idea of the perfect life; it sounded so easy…but it’s not easy.

You may not realize it yet but this story—my story—is a love story; not your typical love story because there is no high school sweetheart, or the good friend that became more than a friend, or a happily-ever-after ending, but it is a love story. It’s not your traditional romantic love story, but more of a story about love—real love—true love in the sense that it’s the truth about love. It’s the complete truth, which includes all of the lies, all of the deceit, all the broken hearts, all the coping, and all of the tragedy. It’s a story about how people usually think that they know exactly what they’re doing right up until that point where they regret everything that they’ve done. In a sense, I’ve just told you the story…my story, but that’s all right; it was never meant to be a story unfamiliar to you. Perhaps you’ve already lived this story yourself; it’s really not that uncommon, after all. I would like to say that everyone has lived this story…It would do my heart a lot of good to believe that, but I don’t. I don’t want to speak for everyone, anyway. Maybe for some, it is not a cliché at all. Maybe the “easy life” of love and living is a reality, somewhere. But I will tell you the story anyways—my story—which begins on this day, in this city, right now…