pain

Why Sometimes The Happiest Ending You Can Have Is Detachment

Image by Claudine Doury

You know that happy endings don’t exist, right?

Like when you watch a movie and the main hero kisses the heroine and the credits roll, and then you get up from the couch or leave the cinema super satisfied: well you should know, it’s all a lie. Remember this next time you have this fake warm feeling that something good has happened in your life.

Because after every screen kiss, the hero and the heroine start living their life together and it turns out that he doesn’t close the toilet lid, or maybe she is too close to her mother, and after ten years he sleeps with his secretary, and leaves the love of his life with two young kids; and she is already forty something, and her already thin lips have acquired a grim expression, and there are dark circles under her eyes, which cannot be hidden by any foundation anymore, nor can that sadness. So there’s your happy ending.

At first the separation was quite tough on me.

Or rather it wasn’t, but I would see flash visions of strange images here and there – the hair on his legs for some reason, the way he would say this or that word. Our laughs or silly intimate moments.

It wouldn’t trigger any emotions, would be more of a matter of observation. These moments would normally come unexpectedly, while I was doing some kind of a routine job, like doing the dishes. Staring at the plates, feeling the warmth of the water on my hands, seeing the soap go down the drain, but having a completely different image float before my eyes.

Then one day I noticed that the happiness was gone.

 

As if my perception of life came in layers, and one of those layers was this relationship, helping me wake up from my nightmares more relaxed and reassured, this protection moment, which allowed me to face the world every day with a sense of security.

So it’s gone now. But it’s OK. I still function in society. I go to work, I see my friends, I apply facial masks and cut my nails. I make flight reservations, and do sports. I don’t see much point in living, to be honest, but – look at the world – everyone does it. They even bring kids into this world. Sometimes more than one. Surely they must have come to terms with the non-meaning, and they still continue to live. I can do that too then, I can’t be more useless than everyone else.

Sometimes I party. Yesterday I went to a club and I stood on the upper floor of the big venue, gazing down. People were watching the stage, moving their heads to the same beat, and I was watching the people. I stared very closely, until my eyes got tired, and suddenly everyone started to look identical. All the bearded boys looked the same, and all the ponytail girls looked the same, with every passing second converting more and more from thinking individuals to this gooey mass of molecules. They were even moving in the same synchronous flow, so it looked like boiling porridge.

I finished my wine and left the club. Not sad, not frustrated. Quite indifferent again, detached, watching another movie in my head about my past life on the way.

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Alina Cvetkova is a writer who, after having tried several European countries, has finally settled in Barcelona. Alina works as a designer and takes care of several artistic projects, as well as writes. She self-published her first book,“Cyan and other stories”, this summer, and thinks that music is sometimes the only thing which helps one survive.

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