I was flicking through the despised last chapter of Captain Corelli last night (no, I haven’t got to the end already). Pelagia finds happiness at last, but what about the fifty years of loneliness in between? I suppose when happiness comes along, you’re just glad for it – if you are happy then, it doesn’t really matter so much what went before. I wonder why he wrote it like that? If they had spent all those years together, maybe they would have ended up in their 50s hating each other, or at least, being indifferent to each other. Well, listen to me, speculating about these fictional characters!
I remember my Erstwhile Male Best Mate saying: ‘Dump the bugger, he doesn’t make you happy, and you’re an ace person, you deserve to be happy.’ But it’s not exactly Hubby’s fault that I’m not happy – he does his best, he can’t help it if he doesn’t know how to make me happy, I don’t even know it myself.
What would make me happy? To do something I enjoy which stretches and uses my abilities; to be paid enough for doing it to live comfortably; to be with the man of my dreams. But who has anything approaching all those things? Those are my fantasies, put safely away in the little fantasy box in my head and taken out from time to time. In the mean time, I have health and material comfort and people who care about me, which is more than some people have.
I have been thinking about what attracts me to people, why do I consider some people to be my friends, and I guess it’s partly the fact that they like me. If people are drawn towards me – and apparently some people are – I’m grateful for that and I respond. There is that great big black hole inside me that is never filled, there’s not enough love in the universe to fill it with. So I keep on looking for more and more to put in there, because I can’t fill it by myself.