expectations

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Carolina plays the flute. She sings. And she dances. She also draws beautiful, light sketches, which she writes in her diary, by the way. She cooks, speaks four languages, helps at the animal shelter. She has many talents, but this evening she only sings, dances, plays the flute.

“You’re so talented,” I say, a little out of breath, and I carry a bouquet of flowers to her wardrobe after the concert. “I know,” she says, a rather rare response to a compliment. But maybe the only correct one. Karolina wipes her face with makeup remover.

“I could probably go pretty far,” she says in a flat voice. “If I put all the energy I put into finding a man into myself. into my work. Into my art.”

At first I don’t know what to say about it, or maybe too much. In the eight or nine years that we’ve known each other, she’s told me so many times, in the same breathless, almost panicked tone, about a new love, a new man, that I’ve lost count. That I sometimes confuse a real man with the last one. And sometimes the title of a book from my early feminist youth comes to mind: The Next Man Will Be Different. To be honest, I don’t remember the contents of the book, but I do know that I took the title literally at the time, almost making it my program.

Nothing would have crossed my mind further than condemning Caroline or anyone else. I find my own way in life only by stumbling, falling and getting up again and again. While I still think about her surprisingly clear, but also somehow rude remark, she is already with another man. “So far so good,” she says. “He’s definitely not a drug addict and he’s not married.”

I’m going to point out to Caroline that this isn’t a very high pain threshold when she says, “But he likes to listen to 80s pop music, and that’s probably not possible.” Here, it may be necessary to mention that, unlike me, Carolina did not consciously survive the 80s, she was a baby. But she must have misinterpreted my expression because she says, “I know, I know, my standards are too high.”

She doesn’t. Against. You can’t expect too much from love.

“Not too high,” I say. “Maybe they are wrong?” I know which ones are correct? If looks and practicality mattered, if we trusted a checklist or an algorithm, Victor and I would never have met. We don’t match at all in many ways, taste in music is the least of it, I’ll just say Dolly Parton and King Crimson. And yet every day I am grateful for this strange twist of fate. So grateful.

“The only thing that really matters is how you feel about the other person, whether you can be yourself,” I say, and then I think I’m talking like a televangelist. Embarrassed, I reach into the snack box provided by the organizer and grab a handful of gummy bears. Carolina removes white cream from her face, as if removing a mask.

Source: Blick