It’s often when we are at our most desperate to be with someone or meet someone that these people turn up unexpectedly at the most unforseen times. This was true with the only woman whom I feel I have ever fallen for at ‘first sight’ It was a physical connection even across the half an underground carriage apart that we were, as I spotted her whilst I was looking for the source of a loud shout that had jolted me out of my tube daze. It did not come from her but from some guy sitting opposite her. Something had, it seemed, dropped onto his lap, or I assume it had as he was brushing ‘the thing’ invisibly away with his hands.
I don’t feel the need to go into detail, other than to say she was the most beautiful woman I had seen up to that point in my life, by a long way. For all my shyness and self-consciousness I knew I couldn’t let her just get off the tube and walk out of my life, without me at least speaking to her. The tube pulled into a station, she stood, I stood, we exited to the platform through different doors and before I had time to think I had tapped her on the shoulder and somehow managed to arrange a date in two days. I felt on top of the world, not only because of her but also due to my uncharacteristic assertiveness and, what I thought, was a brilliantly witty idea of meeting under the Louise Bourgeois sculpture ‘Maman’ outside of the Tate Modern.
It hadn’t even crossed my mind that she wouldn’t turn up until I was standing there under the marble eggs - but it turns out that wasn’t what I needed to worry about - unforeseen, was the way she reacted to the location I had chosen and in my newly found (and bordering on arrogant) confidence my reaction to her was stupid and antagonistic. I was devastated that she walked off and as time passed by I realised what a total dick I had been - not only to her but to myself for throwing away what could have been the best thing to ever happen to me. I had no way to find her again, we had not even exchanged names, let alone numbers.
Over the years I would play back that day and rue my folly - even through the years of marriage, child rearing and career chasing. I would torment myself. How different would my life have been had I just been ‘me’ on that day rather than the person I thought I should be to impress her?
You can imagine, then, how implausible it was, finding myself divorced, with the children off chasing their own lives, travelling alone using up my redundancy pay in Bilbao looking up at the 32 marble eggs in their bronze casket of the Guggenheim ‘Maman’ to feel that presence again after all these years. To hear a shout and to turn and find myself face to face with the woman who had haunted me all these years.
There are many parts of ageing which we rightly rile against, which leave us depressed, sad and pining for those earlier youthful years. But with age comes an honest understanding of ourselves that we could never have had back then. We drop our guards. We no longer need to be someone or something we are not. This time I listened to her and we did talk and we haven’t stopped talking yet.
Barely noticed, the threads of melancholy and myth are permanently attached to us as memories. If we allow ourselves to believe, these can always lead us back to that which we thought we had lost.
‘Maman’ Louise Bourgeois. Tate Modern, London. 2007. Pentax ME Super
what! Is this real? What a text. Incredibly inmersive and well written. Amazing!
I so appreciate your sharing the wistful reliving lost moments. To me it is a sign of being alive and feeling the past so deeply, that remembrance of what never was. I, too, wonder about certain moments of "what if". Sometimes my heart literally aches. Well done, Richard.