Hi. Marianella here. It’s great connecting with you!
In this part of the world, Australia, my name is difficult to pronounce. And I just enjoy the sound whenever people here give it a go.
I grew up thinking that finding the love of my life was the greatest feat to which I could aspire as a human being. I was sure that every step, every day, through the years and the tumult of bad decisions that invaded much of my medium existence, even with my dizzying and unfortunate sentimental baggage, destiny would inevitably take me to the arms of the woman of my dreams.
Can you blame me though?
I am Latin American and lesbian so the boiling blood in my veins and the hundreds of romantic soap operas that I have watched with my grandmother, have helped me to form a clear and precise idea of what real love is.
In addition, children’s tales of unhappy princesses and their dreadful bailouts, 1990s music in Spanish containing high doses of melodic glucose and misogyny in its lyrics, and my culture, made with effusive bits of the bible and the disturbing concept of the sacrosanct marriage, also played their part.
What I never asked myself is: What happens after the fairy tale ends? What happens when there is no quirky inheritance or giant palaces but a thirty-year-old debt to the bank for a city apartment of fifty-five square meters? What if your parents are not smiling kings and proud of your partnering decisions? Wouldn’t you have asked your fairy godmother for a magic crystal ball to know what the future holds instead of the expensive lace dress? What if your Prince Charming turns out to be a princess obsessed with organic products and conceiving a child this year despite the dangers of global warming? And if the precious kingdom is in another continent, thousands of kilometres from everything you are and know? What does that terrible, absurd and confusing phrase, “and they lived happily ever after” mean?
Dear reader, this is not a “romance blog”, although I confess that I am in love to the marrow very much in spite of what my artillery of plaintive phrases may suggest. These days, being so far from my little piece of land on the other side of the world, I miss my laughter rolling over my tongue and I know that my sleepwalking fingers hitting the keyboard can distract my big head from this time, when my shoes seem confused since they are used to another, very far away floor.
So here I am with you, even if I don’t know you.
Would you like a story? Maybe you need it. Maybe I need her more than you.
I give you this space as a way to laugh together at such a mediocre fable injected into our brain. What is life but episodes that we should take with humour?
Read this corner as a dose of innate reality if you want to call it that, or maybe a kind of pause to remember that life after finding love is even more complicated than before and that you have no choice but to make fun of that global hoax and learn to enjoy the torture.
It seems to be more than five years since the first time I saw Ana and now her smell is anaesthesia. A whisper maybe in the process of becoming a melody when your breath is shaking over me. It’s a miracle to have someone like Ana when I see her sleeping on my chest, but it is otherwise the stormiest hell when she wakes me up at five in the morning after a night of insomnia, like so many, to exercise.
Ana sometimes does not understand that we are not only different, but exaggeratedly different. Those who know us can attest to that.
She chooses the food she will eat according to the properties and benefits that it will provide to her body, whereas I grab a fried pork skewer with sweet potato to live in the fucking glory. Meditation is a fundamental part of her day, helping her to balance her daily work and mood. On the other hand, I like to spend hours reading and rereading, becoming melted butter on a pan with my old books by Edgar Allan Poe. Fucking Poe! He is wonderfully crazy.
She loves the sun and to tan on the beach. I love the cold and the comfort of heavy blankets. She is passionate about driving on huge roads at a thousand kilometres per hour. I suffer a nervous breakdown with every random horn sound hammering my ears and my stomach loosens every time I get in front of the wheel.
I know that my life by your side is better. That is obvious. I have become accustomed to her impatient routine and fierce hunger for the world.
To balance the activities acquired at her side over the years of coexistence, I have become a stealthy and accurate strategist capable of predicting her most loving acts, in which I am the unfortunate beneficiary.
For example, the large quantity of vitamins that she buys right and left, as each new forum of enthusiastic non-collegiate nutritionists jumps on the web. She says that health is priceless, but when I see those chubby cardboard boxes coming home, I know that several hundred dollars have impoverished our joint account. She has given me up to ten vitamins to take per day and although I cannot deny that my nails and hair have grown at a wonderful rate, my colon has not thanked her so much and my pockets certainly have not.
I thus learned that every three months or so I should be alert and that if I have to look for her reading glasses, it is because a new god-damn forum of vegetarians, vegans and flexitarians has manifested or a brand new blog of who-knows-what unfortunate is advertising something subtly, some product made with a magical seed of the Amazon, sown by virgin hands of a hidden tribe never before discovered, washed down with holy water from the Orinoco River, which makes you a powerful and immortal being, at your fingertips, with an unsurpassed offer, for a limited time only.
So… sniffing out the possible purchase suddenly made our internet connection break down, so that the computer wouldn’t turn on! Or I showed her an article about the dangers of buying online with a mobile phone. Or my mom wanted to talk to her on the phone; or I started limping and I needed a massage that only she knows how to give; or the light went out and I took the opportunity to conjure some romance. This is how I reduced my daily vitamins to four per day. A big achievement.
I have also gained ground with the amount of meat per week, with the hospital white colour spilling empty in every corner of our home, with documentaries about the importance of recycling on the planet and derivatives, with the purchase of second-hand clothes and their environmental impact, and even with the excessive use of gluten-free products.
Time passed and it seemed that Ana and I had found the perfect steps for our dance, but I had not realised that our life circumstances had facilitated this
Sometimes I think there is something invisible and immense swarming in the environment with a sense of humour as stupid as acid. A kind of bipolar observer who could smile at you with clear empathic amplitude for a moment and then play ruthlessly to crush you only with the intention of seeing you run terrified.
Today, thousands of meters above ground level, heading to see my strange family, I feel her breathing on my neck. Some call her Karma. I will never resign myself to calling this insane one that. Not anymore.
Twenty-two hours of flight without being able to sleep, three stops in places we had never heard of, seven films in a row without Spanish subtitles, our life together reduced to two suitcases, a repetitive nightmare that ended with an observant flight attendant, and lots of wine of dubious reputation, plane food that does not taste as good as it looks and we had finally reached distant Sydney. An amazing city that would entwine our lives forever.
Marianella Casmon.
