Not now

Adversity strips love down to its bare bones. I’m not talking about the kind of adversity that tests it, but more the kind that brings it sharply into focus. It makes me realize how my world has narrowed in the past few weeks, and how imperative it becomes to slough off the unnecessary, and how overwhelmingly obvious it is what (and who) is worth holding onto.

Sometimes it strikes me that my love/sexlife is a triumph of optimism over realism (and in everything else I pride myself in being a realist). “Live in the now!” my best friend burbles. “It’ll all work out in the end,” I mutter, sometimes through clenched teeth. “It’s been almost ten years,” my old love says, and I don’t say I have fallen off that bandwagon of faith more times than I can count, because almost ten years is a long time, and there are other old loves who have kept faith with me that long (and less long), and who still make my life a better place.

Right now, in this now, I sit at my desk with a cat draped across my lap and look at the remnants of Black Cherry nailpolish on my toe, still clinging on from the end of the summer. The not-now, the future, stretches before me luxuriously with its possible plans and its plane-ticketed definite plans and its maybes. Adversity is better kept in the unknown future to be dealt with in the now when there’s no other choice, but love is better savoured past, present and future.