Overread at Table 1: Being in Love is Easy

Being in Love is Easy

Being in love is easy.
The holding of the hands, the picnics in the fields,
the endless laughter at every joke, the hanging on to every
word as though each breath of your lover was another drop of honey.
Dancing through the rain on cobblestone streets in foreign cities
That you explore together, the carefree days
And long languid nights, bodies shared and hair tussled
And clothes wrinkled and who gives a damn if the dishes stay
Dirty in the sink? We’re in love!

But try being in love when you’re bored,
When you have to tell your wife that the credit cards are maxed out
And you just can’t jump on a plane to go to Florida to hang out
On the beach and drink margaritas and watch the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico.
Try being in love with the transmission goes out on the car and
You’ve got no way to get to work.  Try being in love when you
Want to kick your twenty-year-old daughter out of the house for being drunk all the time,
Smokes pot in her room and won’t get a job.
“You don’t understand,” your wife says, “She’s depressed! She’s thinking about
 Slitting her wrists!  I’m trying to save her LIFE!  Don’t you even GIVE A SHIT?!”

Try being in love when your other talks about her nieces whose husbands
Have jobs in engineering firms, oil and gas firms, who, being 15 years younger,
Already make twice as much, have houses twice as big, take vacations twice as long, and
Drive cars twice as expensive.

Try being in love when your lover tells you that all you ever do is binge watch Netflix
Together, and how she can’t be the one whose spending all the money
But she needs new shoes and she never has anything nice for herself and the
Neighbors across the street just bought their middle daughter a BMW as a high school graduation gift
and “I’m so tired of cooking dinner all the time no one appreciates everything I do around here
and I don’t know why we never have any money are you spending it all what are you doing
with the checking account anyway?”

Try being in love when the supple bodies of younger days have turned to stretch marks and crows’ feet
And the slack muscles underneath the skin have lost all their elasticity,
When the glowing eyes of your lover, that once sparkled like diamonds reflected in her glass of wine,
Now are dulled with the strangled frustration of miasmic days.

Check the balance of the checking account.
Look at the bills that will come out automatically toward the end of the month.
See if you’ve got a hundred bucks to take her to her favorite steak house.

Make the call.

Being in love is easy.


MR
2017-0420