She said love finds you. Perhaps it hasn’t found her, worthy, yet.

We didn’t know why she wasn’t married, yet, at her age. We dare not ask.

She wasn’t the approachable type. Besides, we wanted to live long. Didn’t want any tigress pouncing on our young lives.

She was well advanced in years. And we rumored among ourselves why she was still single. We could only guess. She was a form of Methuselah, no one knew if her love life had a beginning and when it ended.

Or, will end.

We only beheld the present form. Or, should I rather say, what remained of it.

Our best guide to exploring what might have happened to a once beautiful, flamboyant youth longing for love and sex was to piece comments she passed occasionally about romance.

Once she remarked her disgust about a young man that asked her out. Can’t remember exactly what she said but it seems she analyzes critically every interest of love that comes her way.

Too young. Too old. Beneath me. Not a good compensation for my long years of waiting…. And all over her and in her every space excuses fill, with no room for potential lovers.

Imagine how wild the green monster lurking in her eyes grows each time she sees young people holding hands or engaging in petty love fights.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they’re doing.” She seems to whisper in such circumstances.

It wasn’t funny what years of waiting and expecting only to harvest the winds does to a person. For an extrovert like her, the intoxicating effects were too obvious. Seems wherever and however she had tried to conceal them, they popped up like tough weed.

She seemed normal when among people. But left alone, with no eye watching, you could sense the heaviness of it all on her mental well-being and body posture. Seems mankind wasn’t designed to go this journey solo.

From a distance, the little tweak needed to spark a giant machine could be hard to detect. But on a closer look, one realizes that there is usually a reason why a fine vegetable is bypassed by many customers. Of course, some just follow other customers blindly. But these are isolated cases.

I’m no judge of character. However, I have to admit that it takes a lot of courage and humility to dig out the ugly obstacles impeding our progress, and to unlearn tricks we thought were invented by the global council of old dogs.

It’s strange. That she  stilll expects a husband at such an advanced age.

Whom am I to dissuade someone from expecting the impossible?

But why wait, keeping fresh vegetables to oneself, refusing to negotiate with desperate customers, till they begin to rot, go stale, before so much noise is made about auctioning them.

Bells are rung, loud music is played. Gimmicks. Sweat. And all passers-by do, is sniff, curl up their noses and walk away.

Too late.

And yet generation after generation,  there is always a volunteer, someone who owns up to be another bad example, of the price of being too expensive, too high, too valuable to give others a chance. Too preoccupied to waste time on love.

It’s human nature. To forget. That time and tide wait for only those whose names are in a special book kept by the Old Man up there.

How sad many assume they are the Ones. Whose Names are in that big book. Living an entire life the illusion whose death is intoxicating, acidic, terribly bitter.

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