| siren song |

In between running the event, welcoming the people, hollering into phones, throwing out namecards and handshakes and plastic smiles, I snuck in a few private moments with S. Corporate friendships―they don't come often. When you find a kindred soul amongst the gyps that come as part of the white-collar package, you learn to treasure this serendipity.

S―her eyes have the same haunted look that I've noticed in my own. Dark. Wary. Weary. With the potential for pain. I know her story, and I share her heartbreak.

'The worst pain is, Jean, when you question why they don't feel half as much as you do. Why you're stranded here, an emotional wreck, and they're there, in one piece. And then you question. Did you love more? Did you feel more? Did you give up more? And why did you love more? Why didn't they? Why?'

Writing this makes it two dimensional. When I hear her, really hear her, her voice was almost monotonous. There was no drama, no torrential emotion, no anger. The words carried the impact, the history, the titantic heartache, the faint cackle of hope. The tone, the voice―they sing with a sort of resignation, white and clinical, ashes of the torment that had come and gone.

When love―the red, crimson tide of passion―runs its course, is this what happens? The bone-dry, tear-stained, white-washed calm of inevitability? I didn't―and I still don't―want this. I want peace, not resignation. I want hope, not indifference.

'It's not about what you want. Love is not about that at all.' S said, an echo of my greatest, most suffocating, fear. That at the end of the day―at the end of the fucking, miserable day―it's not about you. It never was. That's what they never tell you―this big-ticket item called love. They never tell you how painful, how consuming, how brutal, how unkind it can be. Getting over it, they say, another urbanised phase of little meaning. Getting over it takes three pages in a book. Five minutes in a movie. One chorus in a song.

In real life, without the cushion of dramatic poetry, getting over it―it's not even an option. When love leaves, you falter. Every tick of the clock, every turn of the day, the fact that you're left leers at you with its bleak apathy. The world still turns. People are still glossy-mag happy. Couples around you are still in their bubble-gummed world, sweet and pink and elastic. You? You've fought your battle. You've got your medal, singed with blood and memories and tears. And then what? While the rest of the world in coupledom sing to the melody of love, you learn the words to your siren song. You learn the tune, the bridge, the sweet-sad chorus that you never thought one day you would sing.

I think of her, and I think of A, and I think of M, and I think of my own siren song. We are a choir of broken voices.