Loving Despite an Inexorable End in Sight

By Heber Gurrola

He walks into a room and his gaze meets hers.

After a brief exchange of thoughts, innuendoes and enticing hints he decides that it's well worth a second rendezvous upon which a proper and promising rapport will surely be established. Days go by and every re-ecounter exerts a catalytic effect on this newly born relationship. What on first imppression came off as a vain braggadocio on his part, now is starting to ease into her perception as a luring strut. And what at first glance he interpreted as a petulant overweening look in her face, had abrublty metamorphosed into the very sweetener in his cup of tea. Initially it was all about feigning indifference as to arouse his interest, but eventually  uninhibited disclosure became her greatest allure. It was a two-way street. While he veiled his curiosity in fumes of apathy, deep inside he knew  that the cosmos had just presented before his eyes the mere subject of his prayers.  This is it, a series of engaging conversations have made it clear that although mutual discursive dissent will be inevitable, it is perhaps this occasional piquancy, the very combustible which will fuel this two-seater into a joyful journey. However, there is one caveat; the proverbial elephant in the room that tends to be deliberatly overlooked.






She is shackled almost by virtue of her birth to a dogma whose intransigent doctrine alienates those who differ in thought, if not from her social life, certainly from her intimate personal life. She is a gift from the gods in all other senses. She appears to have been meticulously crafted just for him when it comes to anything that matters. He and she stand on similar moral grounds, both possess a relatively comparable academic competence and the two demonstrate an equal zest for lively discussion. Yet the tenets of her faith are like a crimp towards the end of a garden hose, thwarting the harmonious flow of what would otherwise be an enviable ongoing courtship.


As a parenthetical sidenote I submit to you that what's a bit odious about dogma is that it is not amenable to reason and argument. Since it is not grounded or even sustained by the largesse of the intellect, dogma is impervious to logic and pragmatism. Compulsory abidance is enforced upon the youth by their respective progenitors and any efforts to diverge from the tradition even as an adult are generally chastised by way of a sort of social exile and disavowing frowns if not through threats and violence. I shall not digress any further, put in stark terms; dogma sucks.

I found it necessary to sidetrack a little because it is important that we fully comprehend the emphasis afforded to their daunting circumstance. Here is a young couple whose path to personal and professional realization has been carpeted in silk, yet the burden of one's congenital worldview effectively impedes and shatters all positive hope for a future together. In other words, this pair will ineluctably gravitate toward failure, and the worst thing is, they will KNOWINLGY do so. The end is as foreseeable as the lasting Minnesotan winter. Though hiterto they have both enojoyed having lapped up from pristine waters, a rather sour gulp appears ominous in the coming stream, glaring mirthless and approaching in a steady pace. Their only hope is the possibilty of her dereliction in the face of a nagging and intrusive faith.

So I guess the big question is: In the teeth of an imminent and portentous break up, should this couple even bother to embark on a "pointless" venture? And if so, if they set out reaping the fruits of passion and emotional attachment, will this rhapsodic stint outweigh the appalling, unavoidable and predictable ending? And the answer is yes, they should. And to shore up this answer, I have devised an analogous instance of a close-knit attachment that is usually cut short by a predictable passing.

Think of a pet. It could be a charming kitten or the typical ebullient little puppy. Dogs have an average lifespan of 12 years. Hence, by constenting to the adoption of a pet, you have tacitly acquiesced to its intrinsic corrolary i.e. the certainty that he/she will one day die. Furthermore, those who have had the experience of losing a pet know that it is indeed a devastating ordeal in comparison to which, most break ups, simply pale into ingsignificance.

Arguably, most of the pain involved in any loss has to do with the amount of time spent in the company of such loved one, be it a pet or a person. That is why the bereavement that one endures when mourning, say, a mother's departure, is astronomically more profound and poignant than that of the passing of some ordinary aqcuaintance. This is also why the time length of our deppression after a break up goes up in conjunction with the longevity of the relationship. In economics this phenomenon is normally known as "sunk costs". It is the feeling that we have invested time and effort into a business (in this case a relationship), that when it ends our loss figures with repect to such time.

Ergo, I submit that if one has sufficient valor to foray into the aqcuisition of a pet in light of its impending death, then it is only logically consistent to indulgingly succumb to the oenomels of love, sex and attraction, however ephemeral these promise to be.

My First Attempt at Poesy...

I love writing but it has always been prose that has gotten the best of me. This is my first modest and amateurish foray into poetry, and it's also my dicey entrace into this blog. You can imagine the deluge of apprehension coming over me...

An Unexpected Absence in the Ice-Cold Night by Heber Gurrola
-This is partly based on a true story I read. Link provided at the end-.

(My first attempt at poesy)

Little girl gazed mesmerized into the constellation
She was counting stars, which she believed were God's creation
Two hours had passed since an elusive firefly
Had led her astray into the teeth of the ice-cold night.

She sat on the stairway two weeks before
Wearing a little bodice dress, she was only 5 years old
Wielding a magic wand she had cast a spell
So her teeny tea cup would turn into a squirrel

Now she sat spellbound on a protruding rock
In the middle of the desert, fraught with trepidation and shock
The fear of being lost began to carve into her skin
Little girl was all alone, her childlike valor was now wearing thin.

If she yesterday cavorted freely on the snow-covered grass
Tonight she trudged along the desert, all her bliss had come to pass
In fact the temperature kept dropping, two more hours had gone by
When this dainty little princess finally started to cry

Her eyes were heavy and her lips were numb
The wind was freezing, it was eight below
She shed more tears 'til her eyes grew dry
As she wondered shivering, she wondered why

Why she had to follow that glimmering bug
Why she hadn't rather stayed in the safety of her own home
God knew she had asthma, He knew very damn well
That this unintended expedition could mean her departure from life on this earth

On a Sunday prior to this incident she had been assured
That Jesus watched over her from the heaven above
But now it seemed like Lucifer had taken over the world
Oh!  How strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.

She was told that an angel would bless her, love her, guard her
But an epiphany made her realize that such angel was either fanciful or just absent
She'd vowed to her parents she'd never question their teachings
But she felt double-crossed, or such was now her inkling.

Little girl was now coughing miserably, she could barely feel her body
Frostbite had already claimed her toes, her skin..Oh dear!, where is mommy?
Blood dripped from her ears, her little pink coat was now ruined
What's daddy gonna say? He'll make me go stay in my room!

In a matter of minutes she got quite, still and utterly listless
A portentous silence now surrounded this beautiful princess
She had suffered gratuitously, indeed her agony was useless
If things happen for a reason, honestly, wasn't her predicament fruitless?

She would never count the flowers in her garden or the stars up by God's reign
She would never ever dance by herself under the rain
With the promise that tomorrow she'd feel nothing, no sorrow, no pain
She was informed by a wintry snowflake that her eyes would never open again

The moon loomed bright and high in the sky above
While her little heart strained tirelessly, then came to a stop.
Her tiny body laid supine, petrified in the bedeviled night
Her dolly kept her company, neither one now was alive

But this is at best perplexing, she went to school, did her homework and cleaned her room
She did well in her ballet classes, God knows we made all the right moves
Her parents looked for answers to her baby's disgraceful doom.
Her little brother had  no comment, his blank stare was fixed on the moon

Posthumous fretting and pondering, they're as common as they are futile
A five year old had died ignominiously, the universe had turned hostile
It never occurred to mom and dad that God, too, at times screws up
That even when cajoled onto his palm, we are as vulnerable and fragile as the mundane lot

Or maybe, just maybe.... there is no loving daddy perched upon His throne
Who oversees our actions and can listen to our thoughts
Perhaps this watchful father who sits diaphanous in the firmament aloft
Is just as mythical a figure as Krishna, Vishnu, Apollo and Thor.






*Afterword

I'm completely aware of the limitations in my metric. I'm not a professional poet and I wrote this in five hours so I sometimes found myself jamming too many syllables in one single line, thus detracting from the poignancy and cadence of the verse. In the same vein, the use of modern language and some cacophonpus synalephae throughout the last two stanzas effectively managed to atenuate the emotional coloring of the ending.