kagablog

As a little girl I had a huge Art Deco-style poster above my bed. Printed on thick brown paper, it depicted a square-jawed golden prince, determinedly invincible atop his fierce and loyal silver steed, one manly arm tenderly supporting a frail copper-green maiden seated side-saddle in front of him with her eyes demurely cast down. I would look at this image until I fell asleep, and to my impressionable young mind this was the romantic ideal personified.
I read voraciously from the time I got the hang of stringing letters, then words, then sentences together. In a book of fairy tales – the title alas long forgotten – I read a story about a magic mirror that would reveal the face of The One you were destined to love for all time, and another impossible ideal was added to my perception of romance.

Then came early teenagehood, and I turned to music to further my understanding of the ways of the world in general, and romance in particular. From my parents’ stock of tapes I unearthed an album by Françoise Hardy and was immediately smitten. When I grew up I would be just like her. I, too, would have long, straight, windswept hair with a too-long fringe that fell into my heavily-lashed eyes with their languid lids, while I’d sing with a pretty pale-pink pout: ‘Eef we are awnly fwiends, why do you keess me…awl night lonk?’

I would drive through the Sixties’ streets of Paris on a red Vespa to meet my lover at a sidewalk cafè with striped awnings and wrought-iron tables and chairs. Perhaps there would even be window boxes spilling over with bright geraniums, and supercilious fat French pigeons picking jadedly at baguette crusts and camembert rinds. Ah, yes, it was a detailed fantasy, and I spent many happy hours perfecting it, but the face of my fabulous lover was always indistinct, shrouded in shadow.

These fond musings were followed by a couple of longstanding and serious relationships in my late teens and early twenties, interspersed with some briefer and more frivolous encounters, during each of which I adopted a new persona. In my late twenties, craving certainty, I consulted a psychic who told me that I had found a soul mate, but must seek my ‘twin flame’ – he who burns as bright as I. Apparently I had found this magical person once before in a lifetime as a Native American, and had lived my happiest life thus far. Heedlessly I forged ahead with a marriage that produced two beautiful sons and caused much heartache and despair on the winding, rocky, and inevitable road to divorce.

For a while I assumed the role of cynical romantic, that most sad and doomed of creatures, affecting a black wardrobe, a sad-eyed, self-deprecating smile, and a propensity for alcohol.

For the first time in my life since the age of seventeen I was officially single. Of course there were tears, but there was laughter too. I moved to a new town, reconnected with old friends, caught up with family, branched into a new career, took up running, read many books, and found the time and courage to put pen to paper.

Recently I read a novel* based on the theories of quantum mechanics. In laymen’s terms, as far as I was able to comprehend it, quantum theory posits infinite possibilities – the so-called wave function. Somewhat like a PlayStation game, as soon as one option or possible outcome is chosen, the wave function collapses, rendering the other possibilities null and void. In the novel an energy converter is developed, creating such a strong energy field from negative matter that the wave function does not collapse, allowing for multiple universes and lives – past, present and future – to co-exist simultaneously.
This concept was immediately appealing and curiously reassuring to me: perhaps there does exist a parallel universe in which I am paddling a canoe fashioned out of green branches and doe skin across a glass-clear lake with the autumn colours of maple trees and the blues of snow-peaked mountains reflected in it; my papoose strapped securely to my breast and my twin flame close behind me as we row in unison to our womb-like teepee where we are as one, as a world.

* Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey