The Twin Red Line

A long, long time ago, a cybermate (yes, that’s you, Holiday), wrote something about the stages you have got to go through before you can actually love a living, breathing human being of the opposite sex.

She wrote that first you have to start with inanimate things, like a stone for example. The underlying reason being no matter how badly you screw up, you can’t hurt a stone. You may lose it or break it, but you just can’t hurt it. Easy.

Upon being able of loving lifeless object, you should move on to living but not moving objects, like trees. I’ve cultivated a patch of cassavas, back when I was still in Jogja. Not easy. I learnt that my affection for the cassava patch were short-lived as soon as I realized that I had to constantly weed them and water them, and gave them that evil-smelling goat waste.

The next stage concerns with loving a living, moving but unthinking object. Pets, for example. Now, here is where the real problem begins. My efforts to have a pet always ended up in the horrible demise of the poor animal. My cat banged his head to the tire of a moving car. My bird became a stray cat’s lunch. And my fish always went belly-up in the aquarium. Don’t know why.

What worries me is that my cybermate made it very clear that unless you succeed in loving and caring for the objects mentioned above, you are simply not ready for loving a living human being. Now it seems that in just a matter of months, I have made a giant leap from loving stones straight to loving a member of human race. First, I pledged loyalty and life-long dedication to a woman that have been the object of my affection for as long as I can remember. And then, one morning this woman emerged from the bathroom showing me a small stick. There were two red lines on it, instead of one.

Dear God, or whatever divine being reigning up there, I hope you know what you’re doing…