A Story About Her Life

She grew up believing a story about her life, my best friend writes. Her words are beautiful and they hit a chord inside me that is scared; images of the story I believe dance across the eye of my mind and it is true: I still live hoping for the ideal. The click-quick solutions, cliche photos of someone elses life; companionship, contentment, and the satisfaction of living without regrets. It is The Ideal that we watch for entertainment, believe in our dreams, and measure our reality against.

A friend came for tea yesterday. She talked with a calm rationality of the total breakdown of happiness in her reality. The happy family togetherness was replaced by betrayal, suspicion, deceit and finally, tragedy. Heartbreaking as it is to hear her story, it is worse to know that it started off so close to The Ideal; that the road to grief began with beauty; that the ensuing sadness could never escape its predestined comparison with the paradise lost.

I fear the reality, not because of its raw quality or the unrefined mark it leaves on life’s memory, but because I have known The Ideal and, where I and others count me lucky, I know I have the best to measure against for the rest of my life.