Sunday, January 27, 2013

Persuasion

There's this moment that keeps winding itself round my head and throat. A moment that occurred during that last conversation, where I had described the terms of disengagement. For a moment that keeps returning to me, I can't remember exactly what I said. Something like that he'd go back to her and our existence would be wiped. "And what are you supposed to do?" He'd ask me. "Accept it. What else can I do?"

I wonder if I ever could have exploited the luxury of persuasion, as she did. His question makes me wonder if I could have fought, if I could have won. Is it possible to make someone love you again? Is it really possible to win someone back in some grand cinematic gesture? It's a scenario I'd never really imagined for myself, but then I don't believe that I can convince anyone to love me.

I keep seeing all those successful romantic appeals, not in life but in art. There are painted murals, long-haul flights, declarations over the PA and grand-stand karaoke. It indulges that impossible fantasy that you can do something. It's another world where words have this peculiar currency. You can say something heartfelt and persuasive and it'd change the course of your entire life.

There is this hopelessness, living in the knowledge that there was nothing I could have said or done. I imagine that in this flippant question, there was this unexplored possibility and I could have had the life that I was promised. I tend to forget the persuasiveness of the words I had used. I tend to forget how it became apparent that he had never bothered to read any of those carefully crafted appeals.

2 comments:

  1. It was spray-painted on the back of a road sign, along the western approach to Launceston: I LOVE U AJ COME HOME. It became a real feature, even a waypoint - only 10km to Launceston from here. They even wrote an article about it in the paper, but I don't think they ever got the real story.

    I always figured if AJ didn't come home, then she/he probably had a valid reason.

    I think we all would like to believe the big romantic gesture would do the trick - I certainly hope it works at least once in very hundred-thousand attempts. It'd make the world a nicer place, huh?

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  2. That seems so awfully sad, I wonder what happened to AJ.

    What you mention makes me wonder how others make of that gesture of forgiveness. We can always surmise a likely scenario, but a gesture without context makes it much more poignant somehow.

    We'd probably all wish for reconciliation, because that's what they do in the movies.

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