break

I broke the lid of my toilet while leaning it against the tub, trying to fiddle with its broken insides. I exploded a glass plate on my hotplate while a computer technician was fixing my broken internet. I broke a wine glass in my sink. I cracked open a jar, the candle inside got too hot. It’s Christmas break, therefore, I’m broke. I broke a nail. When you don’t have many of these things to begin with, it feels like it matters.

We broke up.

I should have known with all of the omens of things disintegrating around me.
I wrote him down though. A collection of things he said to me, called Simon Says. Brief and funny and more important than he meant. But there is a longer book that has already been written about him. Peter Pan.

God, he really is Peter Pan. And now, here I am, returned back to a room with a small bed and an open window, and the world of adults, feeling like it was just a dream. I even told him once that he was at little imaginary. He has very much disappeared from this place. I guess he’s away with the other lost boys in Never Never Land, fighting off pirates and Indians in his own way. A good story, though more distressing when you feel like you were in it. Actually, it is kind of theraputic though, because now I know who he is.

To steal one of his phrases, “C’est comme ça.” (It’s like that.) The answer to all questions and most of all, why. In English we would probably say “Just because.” No rhyme, no reason. Take it for what it is. It is just like that or like this. You can’t help it or change it because it happened and questioning it is a waste of time, so move on to something else. So much in a simple little phrase.
Lessons learnt: I can still enjoy the carelessness of the imagination- let it in, see it, hear it and even believe it for a while. I can write it down too. But I can also come back now and again to the ‘real world’ and make appointments, have goals, go to bed, pay bills, answer the phone, use an agenda notebook, listen to my parents, buy groceries and know what day it is. Which he, I suspect, is still trying his best to avoid. We are on two different pages of the same old book. C’est comme ça.

Peter: Forget them, Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you'll never, never have to worry about grown up things again.
Wendy: Never is an awfully long time.