Wabi-Sabi Love
I spent the rest of that Tuesday in bed, waiting for a call which never came. I’d written a couple of messages to Gabriela, but her answers were very curt. She’d shut herself away, and heaven only knew when she was going to say something.
I listened to it on Spotify. A husky voice sang over distorted guitar chords:
Where has the magic gone?
Clouds wrap your bright soul.
Embrace me,
I’m a child now
Begging for a smile.
As often happens in these cases, the song seemed to be about my twisted story with Gabriela.
Maybe it was true that, at some point in the eight years that we’d been together, the magic had gone without my noticing, and she had felt stifled by routine.
Or it might simply have been a problem of different expectations.
Although we never actually lived together, I liked the rituals we’d established in our relationship.
A couple of times a week I went to meet her after work—she had a job in an art gallery—or she came to get me.
We’d go to see a foreign movie, always in the original version with subtitles, after which we’d have dinner, then go to her place or mine and make love.
That was it, week after week. We rarely went out at weekends.
She said it depressed her to be part of the herd, and she preferred to stay at home reading.
Stop your grumbling,
Life is pure imperfection.
Things are bumpy and rough
That’s what’s so funny about it.
Once again I recognized in the words of the song “Wabi-Sabi Love” something that Gabriela had always chided me for. She said I grumbled like an old man when the world didn’t work the way I wanted it to, and that I couldn’t go with the flow of life as it really was.
Every obstacle was proof for me that human beings have been thrown into a world where there is no cosmic justice. Things happen for no reason—and here I had a major disagreement with Titus—so there’s no point in looking for the whys and wherefores. We are shipwrecked in the sea of chance.
Gabriela didn’t like my way of seeing things.
She preferred to believe that she was guided by destiny.
It was destiny that now told her to break up with me.
Perhaps she thought I had nothing more to give her.
I’d become predictable. Maybe, after a pause, she’d look for someone a little wilder.
An artist perhaps—one of those promoted by her gallery?
She’d certainly have more things to talk about with him than with a demoted German lecturer living alone with a cat.
Getting comfortable on my feet, Mishima let out a miaow as if he could hear my inner lament. The song had finished, and so had my first—and perhaps last—love story.
Wabi-Sabi love,
Circles never close.
Let’s crash
Our unwise dreams
Against the world.