‘Not Marriage Material’ – Submission 1: (Not) in Pieces by Sue Wald

Not Marriage Material is an upcoming anthology of non fiction and poetry – submissions are currently open. More information can be found here.

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(Not) in Pieces by Sue Wald

1. Heart: Strings attached

It has been twice in a row now that I have woken up with a very vivid image of you burnt into my retinas.
Yesterday I had managed to shake you off with a determined shrug of my shoulders – it was Samhain, and I had an important anniversary on my mind – one that could have been ours but never was: I believe it was on that jolly day – or night, rather – that beautiful Lily was conceived, exactly 20 years ago. Some years post you.

But as I did some last minute pumpkin carving in the afternoon, I let my restless mind wander, and I permitted myself to ponder what it was that was doing this hollering inside me, demanding to be heard, to be let out.
Rather than be carved up from the inside, I would – in the spirit of Allhallowtide – do some soul searching.
And I came up from the depths of my well with a bucketful of lines.

Epitaph

I woke up puzzled
I wanted to smile back at you
match your dream smile
I woke up asking myself
‘how can it be that I love you?’
yet the love is there
I taste its sweetness on my lips
there is also the disappointment
it left a bitter taste in my mouth
on my shoulders the weight of twenty years of waiting in vain
I was a fool
you were a coward
correction I am a fool
you are a coward
my subconscious generates a jolly little picture show and I wake up happy
there is no saving myself from myself it seems
there is no end to my foolishness
you had asked me to wait in the wings so you wouldn’t have to lie to your children so you could teach them not to lie
fair enough
you had asked me for ten years apart
I gave you double that and more
from a very long distance I let you know where to find me
I deserved better than this piece of paper that found me instead
it sounded like something someone would say about me at my funeral
I had no choice but to cremate it
I can’t believe your smile climbed up my stockade and reached out to touch me
I woke up happy for chrissake
makes you laugh
doesn ́t it

2. Heart: Strings a little worse for wear

End of matter, or so I thought, and resumed the task of decorating the portal of our home at the Ría del Sor on this last, and decidedly grey, day of October.

Come November, the weather is displaying a variety of shades of grey, as is fitting for All Saints’ and its martyrical connotations, and the colour of my mood upon awakening can only be described as gun metal.
Today, I change tactics. I tackle the task head on.
I dive into my well again, where I have a rummage around amongst weary sentiments, supressed feelings and mixed emotions to find that one notion that would allow me to come up for air.

Full of vigour, I put pen to paper.

Life-span of a Ghost

I need to stop reading poetry
it conjures up nightly images of you your impertinent ghost asked
‘Why are we here?’
‘Because I love you’ my foolish dream-self answered
it was wearing its heart on its sleeve it seems
would you kindly heed to the eviction notice tacked to said heart
it needs to be cleared cleaned cleansed you cannot remain there and be gone at the same time would you kindly abandon the premises after all, you’ve been gone for a good twenty years
the pictures on its walls have long been taken down
do not make any more appearances if you please
else I will have to stop reading poetry

3. Love ́s Labour ́s Lost (British version)

There. Notice has been served. Begone.

I have always been a complete disaster where falling in love is concerned. There was the strange case of Jim when I had just turned 20.
He was tender, attentive.
Physically impressive: broad shouldered, 6 foot 6 tall, and with an uncanny resemblance to the singer of Spandau Ballet.
We had a whirlwind ten week romance during my last summer holiday, in a coastal town in Kent, before going off to university.
Picture myself, months later, radiant, with my £12.99 Argos engagement ring on my finger and my heart in my mouth, pacing the Square below the Eiffel Tower in the pouring January rain, with my concerned mum in tow, only to find out via a desperate late-evening phone call to a well-meaning mutual acquaintance that he wouldn’t be coming.
Jim had turned out to be, in fact, not James, but Jason, on the run from the law under a false name, and now safely tucked away in a correctional facility for juvenile delinquents in Oxford.
I had just enrolled at University, to study Law.
I never did find out what he had done, although come Easter I had flown to London and taken a coach from Victoria Station to Oxford, unannounced, to break up with him in person, as – at least in my eyes – was the decent thing to do.
Heaviness was descending on me, so I took a taxi from the bus-station.
The taxi whizzed past a group of pedestrians waiting at a pelican crossing. He was amongst them, sticking out like a sore thumb.
Our eyes locked for a split second.
He eventually arrived at the spot where I had stopped the taxi to get out, completely out of breath from chasing after it, and we walked to a quiet spot at the bank of the Castle Mill Stream in silence.
I remember nothing of our conversation, nor of my journey back.

4. Love ́s Labour ́s Lost (U.S. version)

Two years later, weak-kneed and in love from the moment we exchanged our first words, I fell for Tim, a strawberry blonde Californian First Sergeant who had just won custody of his two young teenage children from his German ex-wife, but, as I found out a little too late, already had a new wife, and a new son.
I believed him when he told me that although he and his wife would make the move back to the United States together, they would then part company, at which point I was supposed to join him.
Weeks later, my gut told me to find out his new private phone number.
My gut was right: the wife picked up the phone.
So, within 24 hours, I boarded another plane, this time to Atlanta, almost missing the connecting flight to Little Rock, Arkansas, because it took me a while to convince the Immigration Officer that although I hadn’t brought my passport (only my German ID-card), he could rest assured that I would be boarding my plane back home in 3 days’ time no matter what.
I kept my promise to the guard, albeit stony-faced and with my heart in pieces.
The classic American Dream veranda, complete with rocking chairs, somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota he had so vividly painted a picture of for us never materialised, not even for himself:
he contacted me via Twitter almost 30 years later, dying from cancer in Texas, to tell me that he had seperated from his wife years ago.
Needless to say I only learned from his obituary that he was already on his third wife by then. The leopard really cannot change its spots.

5. Love ́s Labour ́s Lost (Canadian Version)

Enter, not much later, a Canadian, also serving in the U.S. Army. We managed to stay friends – hardened veteran of heartache that I was – even though he unceremoniously went to live with his ex-girlfriend in Colorado when his stint in Germany ended.
We bumped into one of his platoon mates in a supermarket in Phoenix ten years later, completely by chance, while I was visiting, and we thought it quite hilarious when the guy naturally assumed that we had married.

6. Love’s Labour’s Lost (Turkish Version)

Next, there was this gorgeous green-eyed barkeeper who went by the name of Nino, a little younger than myself.
Well, we were already living together when one day, on a whim, I risked a look at his ID card, only to find out that the age gap was in fact not two, but six years.
Of course it didn’t end well.
I got a phone call from the jeweller’s to pick up the wedding rings a day after I had sent him packing.
I had found a piece of paper with a phone number in the pocket of a pair of trousers I was going to put in the washing machine.
Want to guess?
Of course I phoned the number.
Of course a girl picked up the phone.
The only comfort is that it wasn’t just any girl, it was the girl he did marry.

7. Love ́s Labour ́s Lost (Home Turf Version)

I did tie the knot once, in a lovely coastal town called Ålesund in Norway, placing my bet on a good friend being a safe bet as my partner for life.
The worst assumption I have ever made, apart from the time when I thought that Trump would not in a million years be able to rally enough voters to become president of the United States. I couldn’t have been more wrong on both counts.
I walked out, completely frustrated, with just my personal belongings, after 5 years and moved into a room above The Griffin, an English Pub I was running at the time.

8. Love’s Labour’s Lost (Reloaded)

Time for a confession.
Right after this complete and utter failure, I proceeded to commit the same mistake I had made a decade earlier.
Married man, three kids.
Guilty as charged.
Yes, he of the two earlier poems.
I really took our solemn promise to try again in ten years’ time to heart, even went as far as exiling myself: 3.440 km as the crow flies.
Never lost hope, not in 20 years.
I was beaten to the happy ending.
I rest my hopeless case.

9. Love’s Labour’s Lost (Comic Version)

And last, but not least, my daughter’s ‘progenitor’, a well-known comedian from my hometown who lost his sense of humour when, at 35, after having spent a very jolly All Hallow’s Eve together and having parted ways two weeks later, I decided to give this little bundle of joy inside me a chance nevertheless.
I gave up on men there and then.

10. Love’s Labour’s Lost (Relapse)

Ooookayyy. One exception. Just the once. Irresistible chef from Catalunya. I’ll say no more.

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About the Author: Sue Wald

Not cut out for marriage, Sue Wald has nevertheless settled down where and with whom she wants to be: not too far from a secluded sandy beach where the salty breeze can still reach her. She is enjoying good food and a good read in the company of her mum and her cats and dogs, now that her daughter has gone off for her own adventures and studies.
As a Thursday Child and multilingual language teacher, she has helped enough school children (and a few adults) on their way to be able to look back on a life not wasted and heave a sigh of relief.
Under her Nom de Plume, ‘Sue Wald’, she has penned ‘A Day in the Life’, a Very Short Memoir of a hundred pages, set over the three days of Hallowtide. When two urns in the author’s garden inspire her to transport the reader almost a hundred years back in time, from the Ría del Sor in Galicia, Spain, via Nürnberg in Franconia, Germany, to Oskar Schindler’s hometown Zwittau in Sudetenland, now in the Czech Republic. With the help of poetry and stories within stories – preserving the language the piece was originally written in and including its translation into English – she offers glimpses into her granddad’s life before, during, and after WWII, including an entertaining lunch encounter with Oskar, as well as peeks into her own life and ghosts of the past.

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If you are interested in submitting a piece for the upcoming anthology Not Marriage Material please read the guidelines here.