“Uncertainty is a terrible high. Don’t mistake it for love.”

But could anyone have told me? And if someone had said it, spelled it out in so many words, would I have listened?

Would I have believed? Probably not.

Believe it, my beautiful girl.

I’m not telling you to give up on love.

Only to be careful.

Rejection and withholding are powerful aphrodisiacs.

Do as I say, not as I did.

Don’t confuse hurt with desire.

Don’t waste decades with jerks.

Don’t let that guy hook you on hope. Don’t be home when he calls.

It’s time to speak up for those unflamboyant, decent men who really want us.

It’s a terrible error not to take them as seriously as we take the jerks.

It’s time to revise the turn-on: not the miracle of his occasional true devotion but the certainty that he really will show up here tonight.

The other way to too devastating. Too sad.

You get old too fast trying to live like Piaf, sniffing the desert wind on yet another thrilling one-night man.

There’s nothing I can do about the years I was turned on by uncertainty and lusted after the unobtainable and suffered for it.

Nothing except, like the Ancient Mariner, to tell the tale, to say that everything is different with me today, to report that you don’t have to parch on the salt sea to appreciate to drink of fresh water.

Here’s how I live now: beside a gentle canal where we once watched a pair of wild turkeys strutting on the towpath like some old married couple, riotous and ordinary, heads up.

Like that, kid. With a good man. You hear me?

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals; despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks; stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others; hate tyrants; argue not concerning God; have patience and indulgence toward the people, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book; dismiss what insults your very soul, and your very flesh shall become a great poem.

~ Walt Whitman

<--Back