Draped in Dew
No Thrills, No Frills
With Licia I became aware that I was repeating a pattern I had been repeating with Gisela before. Gisela had not been my first heartbreak. The first time I fell in love was the summer I turned thirteen. An age when love was but a word to me. Her name was Susanne, but she preferred to be called Susen. Without reflecting on it, I assumed her name to be written and spoken the English way, Suzanne, at a subconscious level identifying her with the Suzanne of Leonard Cohen’s song …
Falling in love, however, is not a simple affair of just one cause with just one effect, however devastating. Not with me. The mystery reveals itself in the course of events, and long as I’m not dead, there may be no end to the revelations waiting for me. The virus remains alive and viral, long after the upheaval has died and the wounds appear to have grown a protective cover of scar tissue. Underneath the cover, the infection is alive, and if it has not worked out well, the pus and poison will eat its way to the heart’s core, to get at the truth of who I am and what I may be looking for …
I met Suzanne at a summer camp. It was my second summer holiday at the camp. The year before, my voice had dropped in register, and I was very much aware that the other boys were still talking and screaming at a much higher pitch. To emphasize my advanced maturity, I worked hard on enhancing the darker shades of my voice, so it seemed natural and quite adequate that my attention was drawn to the one and only girl at the camp who was at a similarly advanced level of maturity. The first girl with whom I noticed that she had all the right things at the right places. And she knew it, too. Always in rather close fitting scanty pretenses at dressing, more enhancing than covering up the abundance of graces bestowed on her …
Yes, I was a lucky fellow to win her attention. Even the students who served as counselors and guardians at the camp, expressed poorly disguised distress over seeing me spending most of my time in the company of the secret object of their own clandestine craving. The one and only fatal attraction that made everybody forget possible competition elsewhere. The universe had come into existence with Suzanne, emerging out of nowhere to bedazzle us and the rest of humankind. Somebody have mercy on us …
What made her appeal lethal was its freshness, still draped in the dew of innocence. Her awareness of her impact had not marred her self-perception yet. Taking it in stride without blinking, her attention open to what life might have to offer. To me this is the most precious moment in the life of a girl entering womanhood — becoming aware of her potential, taken by surprise and, depending on her potential, possibly staggering under the impact of implications as it dawns on her where she is heading. The point of no return. Her future depends on how she navigates this moment …
The moment is past before a girl has had time to make up her mind. Other agencies have decided on the direction she will be heading. Her life will tell her what agencies were at work, and it will be up to her how she intends to deal with the choices she made. Life is about owing up to the choices we made, and thus getting in touch with our real self that is buried at the core of our heart and of the wounds inflicted on us. The pain I feel will show me the way to my primal wound, the wound of my initial betrayal that has made me aware of myself as an independent, lost and lonely entity …
Without the pain of being betrayed, I would not wake up and leave the cave I have been born to. The hostile environment of a frigid womb, poisoned by the toxins of generations past whose wounds had not healed in time. The poison handed on to the children, seeds of a future that is supposed to be better than the world our ancestors have been struggling with. For us to wake up to our initial betrayal, requires pain and suffering beyond our mental capacities. To be reborn in the wound of our sacrificing. Life begins when we cannot make sense of it any longer …
Suzanne did not betray me. She was the angel of temptation who woke me up to potentials I had not been able to imagine until then. Like every other boy my age, I was familiar with pictures of naked ladies displaying their product, and they made me do things I would be too ashamed to confess. Had I been able to look at Suzanne with a sober mind, I would have ranked her among the most tempting and tantalizing ladies on display anywhere. Like I said, she had all the right things at the right places, and in just the right proportions, and so on ad infinitum. Yet despite all those splendors, I never saw her in line with any product on display anywhere …
She made me dizzy alright, and in ways I did not want to stop. However, her physical graces were but the wrapping of the package. Her deeper allure was alive and vibrant in her voice. Even today I can call up her voice, a silken purr, never loud or intrusive, nor shy either, just calm and resting in herself like a cat who inhabits a universe of her own. And I was the madly lucky fellow allowed to share that universe with her. For a few weeks …
