I got out of the sanatorium in a month or six weeks. With the end of June, came our big examination—the higher certificate, which I took in French and German and Latin. Then we went away for the vacation, and I settled down to wait until September for the results of the exam. Pop and Bonnemaman and John Paul were once again in Europe for the summer, and we all spent a couple of months in a big, dreary hotel in Bournemouth, standing on top of a cliff and facing the sea with a battery of white iron balconies, painted silver, so that they gleamed in the pale, English summer sun and in the morning mist. I will not go into the emotions of that summer, in which I and a girl I met there kept going through storms of sentiment alternating with adolescent quarrels, during which I used to escape from Bournemouth into the Dorset downs and wander around for the whole day in the country trying to recover my equilibrium.
But at the end of the summer, when she went back to London, and my family also took the boat at Southampton and went home, I packed up my rucksack and went into the New Forest, with a pup tent, and sat down under some pine trees at the edge of a common a couple of miles from Brockenhurst. Oh, the tremendous loneliness of that first night in the forest! The frogs sang in the brackish stream, and the fireflies played in the gorse, and occasionally a lone car would pass along the distant road, exaggerating the silence by the sound that died in the wake of its passing. And I sat in the door of my tent, uneasily trying to digest the eggs and bacon I had fried and the bottle of cider I had brought out from the village.
She had said she would write me a letter, addressed to the post office at Brockenhurst, as soon as she got home, but I thought this camp site at the edge of the common was too dreary. Besides, the water of the stream tasted funny and I thought maybe I might get poisoned, so I moved on down toward Beaulieu, where I did not have to eat my own cooking, but ate in an inn. And I spent the afternoon lying in the grass in front of the old Cistercian abbey, copiously pitying myself for my boredom and for the loneliness of immature love. At the same time, however, I was debating in my mind whether to go to a “Gymkhana,” that is a sort of a polite amateur horse-show, and mingle with all the gentry of the county, perhaps meeting someone even more beautiful than the girl for whom I thought I was, at the moment, pining away even unto death. However, I wisely decided to avoid the tents of such a dull affair.
Love is a difficult thing. Most modern movies would have you believe that, after a bunch of complications and confusements, the boy and girl declare their undying love for each other, get married, and live happily ever after. It doesn't quite work like that. Even after saying "I do" to each other, the boy and girl will continue to experience complications and confusements until death they do part.
I hate to sound like a pessimist, but those are the facts. Fairy tale endings are just that--fairy tales. In reality, true love is hard work, day after day. Some days are easier than others, and some are harder. If you aren't up for that, I would recommend moving to marsh in North Carolina and living in a shack. Or finding a religious order that requires a vow of isolation. That's the only way to avoid heartbreak that I can think of, and, even with those precautions in place, love may still find you, and, therefore, heartbreak, too.
Now, the question to ask is this: is love worth the heartbreak? At the moment, I'm not sure I can answer that question. In fact, I don't think I will ever be able to answer it. At various times during my life, my kids have declared, loudly, "I hate you!" I think that's some kind of rite of passage for children. My wife and I have tottered back and forth between stability and collapse in our marriage, due to various issues. Mental illness and sexual addiction primarily.
I truly wish that Walt Disney was right. I want to live in a feature cartoon where, after defeating the evil queen's wicked spell, boy and girl ride off in a horse-drawn carriage as the music swells and 5,000 doves take wing. I don't want to be in a Pixar movie, where true love ends in the jaws of a hungry barracuda in the first five minutes, or in a montage that covers a love from first kiss to last breath in about two minutes.
I am not going to give you any kind of definitive answer in this post tonight. I don't know if love is worth heartbreak. Just like I don't know if I'm in a Disney or Pixar movie. Happily ever after or barracuda attack. Falling in love is easy. Staying in love--that's where it gets tricky.
Saint Marty will sleep tonight, dreaming Disney dreams. A couple wine coolers will help with that. The miracle of alcohol.
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