Shining Through

I’m sitting on top of my bed with the lights off, typing this away. I know it seems silly to do this but it just seems better this way.

I just finished reading a book a few minutes ago. It was good. The original story of Shining Through. A movie was made from it in the 80s. It starred Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith. Now if you’ll ask me which one is a better version, I am in that frame of mind where I’d say, the answer is up to you.

If you’re a romantic, you’d like the movie version better. It looked better and told a less complicated story. She loved him. She had a good German accent and had common sense. She volunteered to be a spy during World War II. She got into trouble. He rescued her and 30 years later, they were still in love.

The book wasn’t like that. The movie took most of the important scenes and details but the book was grittier, more real.

After closing the book, I took my usual position when I’m going to sleep. I started to say my prayers, but in the middle of it, tears came.

I was envious of Linda Voss Berringer. She’s the character in the book. She may have married a beautiful spineless creep, but in the end, she found love. The right kind. She has the rest of her life to look forward to; laughing, talking, arguing and making love with Ed Leland. And she didn’t have to compromise or settle to have it.

I know I have said often enough that I’m okay being 39 and single. After all, being lonely while alone seems to me a better option than being lonely while you’re with someone.

But when I opened my mouth to talk to Him, what came out was, “Is this what I’m looking forward to, God?”. I had looked with my mind’s eye what the future for me would be like, and so much like Detective Dimitri Noh in Flash Forward, I see nothing.

Isn’t there anyone in this vast world who can see past the armor I had put around myself? Yes, I know. You’d say, then lose the armor. But see, I can’t. And I don’t feel like I should. As I say to my close friends, if he can get past it, if he can see through it and not cringe at what he’d see, if he can love and live with the person inside, then he deserves everything I can give him.

But so far, he, all of them, always falls short.

Then you’d probably say, maybe you’re too stringent, no one is perfect. But see, the main reason all the men in the past fell short was because I relaxed my parameters.

So I got cheated on, been passed up for his mother and for a girlfriend by another, used, distrusted and neglected. Is it such a wonder now why not relaxing them appears to be the better option? How can I expect a different result if I will always do the same thing?

And so I’m back to where this rambling started. In bed with eyes red from crying. To make matters worse, I don’t even know if I still know how to be with someone anymore.

Well, a friend once told me, it will all come back when I already have someone to love. But to paraphrase Charlotte from Sex and the City, “Where is he?! I’m tired already!”

Until then, I guess I will just have to fend for myself, and just get myself through these tears-filled bedtimes, till he comes. If he does, at all.