Years of Sweet Laughter
As I’ve been cleaning up and categorizing my written work (poetry, short stories, personal histories, and assorted essays), I sometimes come across something that I want to brush the dust off, and share more widely.
One technique that I’ve successfully used to overcome writer’s block is to open up a favorite book at a random page, and use the last full sentence at the bottom of the page as a jumping off point for a short story or poem. A variant of that has been to use a snippet of song lyrics, and I think that this is where this one came from. I say “think” as I can’t find any song with those lyrics. Maybe, that’s just what I thouht the lyrics were. 🙂
Years of Sweet Laughter
Years of sweet laughter
I became less than perfect
And you turned your back
“Forever and forever” she had said. That was in response to his question of “how long can this be so good?” Standing where we are today, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we see that not even at that heady moment in time were the foundations of their relationship solid enough to make such an all-sweeping statement. Sure, they loved each other. Sure, they liked each other. Sure, they thought that the sweet laughter would go on forever, but they hadn’t allowed for the possibility of doubt and suspicion creeping into their lives. They hadn’t allowed for the way that those negative emotions could and would eat away at the very bedrock that their relationship was built upon, that of unquestioning trust.
It had started with a small white lie—the smallest and whitest of lies that could possibly be. The strange thing is that what that lie was became lost in the avalanche that followed. All traces of where it had started were rapidly and thoroughly obliterated by how quickly things escalated and the terrible impact it had on both of their lives. As they sought to escape the avalanche that threatened to consume them, they lost sight of each other for a moment. By the time they looked up, it was too late. It was as if they could see each other off in the distance, but from that moment, their paths had diverged, and no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t come back together.
It was a cold Friday morning in November when he gave up on the life he had built around her and started to rebuild his own. The sad thing was that, by that time, she didn’t even notice. She’d made that same decision herself months earlier. In a change of behavior that signaled the end of both their marriage and ultimately their friendship, she omitted to mention it to him. When asked why by the marriage counselor later, during their last-ditch, too-little-too-late attempt at reconciliation, she replied, “I’d become less than perfect… and for him, and for myself, that just wasn’t good enough.”