To more years with crazy angel
Those years, I didn’t know the first thing about loving a gorgeously eccentric, unreasonable woman.
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Years ago, there was an ad on TV that never failed to upset me.
It featured a man who had a seemingly perfect life: He was a writer who lived in an apartment on the second floor of a stunning old building in a French village.
In the ad, he and his girlfriend had a heated argument. She suddenly grabbed his exquisite vintage Underwood typewriter and tossed it through the window.
He walked downstairs, picked it up from the cobblestones and took it back before resolving their argument. Suddenly that angry, unreasonable girl turned into pure sweetness and continued to do the thing that upset me most – she laid down on his bed and ate a fragile, crumbly chocolate on the luxurious white linen.
Why on earth didn’t he simply kick her out and replace her with a balanced girl who respects his Underwood and bed linen?
Those years, I didn’t know the first thing about loving a gorgeously eccentric, unreasonable woman. I still don’t, but I have sympathy with that weakling – today I am him.
Seven years ago, the lovely Snapdragon grabbed me by the arm and bit the back of my hand. I could feel her teeth breaking my skin and sinking into my flesh.
“Marry me,” she commanded with a bit of my blood trickling from the corner of her mouth. I was smitten with the beautiful mess. I don’t have an Underwood, but I won’t be upset if the lovely Snapdragon hurled my computer through the loft window of our humble townhouse.
It doesn’t boot up and the hard drive makes funny noises.
She doesn’t eat crumbly chocolates in bed, but she curls up next to me with a jar of peanut butter and a teaspoon while reading chick lit. The crumbs of badly written dialogue spill from her book and stain our Egyptian cotton. She’s perfect.
It’s her birthday on Wednesday. I dream of spending decades more with this perfectly insane angel. I don’t wish on you to fall in love with such a wonderful idiot in 2021. It’s sheer hell. You’ll spend decades picking up virtual Underwoods from the ugly paving outside your townhouse.
Such a love is a virus and marriage is the hard lockdown which deals with it. But I can wish you the second best: a merry Christmas and a prosperous 2021. And untainted bed linen.
Dirk Lotriet.
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