Theme Park at its Darkest

“If she’s amazing, she won’t be easy. If she’s easy, she won’t be amazing. If she’s worth it, you won’t give up. If you give up, you’re not worthy. Truth is, everybody’s gonna hurt you; you just have to find the ones worth suffering for.”

– Bob Marley

“Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres…”

– Corinthians, 13: 6-7

1.

Sometimes it’s best to begin a story at the end. Which, in this case, was in the office of my psychologist.

Dr. G – has a corner office on the third floor of his building. It heats up like a fishtank in the afternoon sun.

“So,” he said, sitting back and crossing his legs to balance the notepad, “Why are you here?”

“Well doctor, I keep meeting the same kinds of women and I can’t have a relationship with any of them. The relationships get shorter and shorter to the point where the last one was over in a week.”

“A week?” he said.

“It’s affecting my ability to function,” I said. “It’s the first time since I was eighteen that I haven’t been able to write. I’m not interested in anything and everything I write is lifeless. The only thing I’ve written for the last six months is letters to her.

“In actuality,” I continued, “I only knew her for a week. The actual relationship ran for about ten hours. But I’m madly in love with her.”

“What did you love about her?” he asked.

“It’s probably better if I tell you the story,” I said. He leaned toward me in his chair like the wedding guest from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

**

The difference between blogging and fiction is that what you read here is ostensibly true. There’s a degree of the ‘train wreck’ factor about looking into someone else’s life, and very few people are going to sit down and relate their tales of stalking, tainted as it is with connotations of genuine psychopathy, painted on the thin end of the sex-crime wedge.

Gregory David Roberts, author of Shantaram, is the only ‘real’ person in that novel. Talking with him about that book can be frustrating; you want to ask for more information on a ‘true’ story that features a protagonist who escapes Pentridge prison over the front wall in the middle of the day and runs away to India to live in a slum.

And he’s fine to tell you about himself and his adventures, but if you stray towards any of the other characters in the book, he’ll tell you, with a grin, that it’s fiction.

I can’t recruit the same defence here, but it would be a violation of the blogger’s unwritten code of ethics to render the woman in question in any recognizable way. That said, I can’t just leave her as a black hole in the middle of the tale. Let’s call her Eurydice.

This entry was posted on November 20, 2014 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Acts of devotion, Love letters, Observation, Real Men with tags Bob Marley, Corinthians, Eurydice, Gregory David Roberts, India, love, obssession, Psychiatrist, psychopathy, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, sex crime, Shantaram, slum, stalking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.