Reality overrated

I have a deliriously happy friend. She deserves her happiness - a new marriage and home, new family, new realizations and contentment coming forward to embrace after years of uncertainty and self-loathing. How she deserves her happiness! And the new river she now swims!

I envy her, my river has become a bitter thing, a lava river full of black stones, evil tides, recriminations and turbulance, unquiet slumbers.

I see a movie, a worthy girl, honest and loving, is mistaken to be a fortune seeker, or worse, and she looses the man she loves, for his sole support is his family, which vows to disown him if he chooses her. Sounds archaic. Sounds Jane Austin. Well, indeed it is. But it was my own story also, in this ridiculous real world. He left me, claiming his family's obsequious objections and those I told the story were agast: surely if he loved you! He loved me or so he claimed, and ruled my heart as surely as any Heathcliff's Cathy (different author but you glean my meaning). My eyes burned with the recognition and waste. I am no Jane Austin to take her pen and write her tears into great novels with heroines who end happily after oh so many trials. No.

Too many set backs that I can no longer find my way round. The lawsuit. The ongoing loss of M, my failure to be the actor I would like to be, the trap of this career that I cannot leave and know it is killing me. My mother's horrifying condition...

I did a staged reading. A little pleasant play, and delighted to render a kiss - a stage kiss, but flesh upon flesh nonetheless and the days and nights and months and years since I was touched awakened that dormant part and has made all this waiting and striving to do what is right seem so useless. I want that kiss- no, I want the promise of the three kisses the actor graced me with in parting as he joined friends and disappeared into the late afternoon. Cheek cheek mouth. The sensation of beard against my lips. An entire world there. All embraces and all promise of embraces to come and yet unknown.

I have known this actor at least ten years, longer, always aching to act with him, for he is quite fine, but self-conscious and absorbed somewhat as we are. So I hadn't thought of him much, and with mutual friends I have tried to see his work, but often found the timing impossible. And that he always seemed to be a bit distant or have a much younger girlfriend...ah. There.

But something he said, forlorn perhaps, he asked me in considerate actor fashion how long the kiss should be - considering scripts and such. Of course a kiss should always last as long as it must last...I commented on the lamentable absence of kissing in my recent past, which he responded with a sadly longer time frame. So I wondered a little- what had he learned during such respite.

What have I learned?