At their reception couples, kids like them, dance to pop music, its simple infectious beat fizzing their blood.  He meets his bride’s friend for the first time, wonderful wide eyes, full lips, her beauty pageantry squeezed into a tight black dress.  After dancing with his bride he dances with her, her sexiness spellbinding, and she seems to respond in kind.  He wants to kiss her right there, an impossibility the sexy girl whispers, or something to that effect.  Friends call out ribald remarks.  His bride claims him for another dance but the girl’s eyes meet his again as she dances with somebody else, this craziness maddening him, his marriage only hours old.

Is love, that attention-grabbing many-splendoured thing, really just the desire to see the self reflected?  If this boy bridegroom, not an habitual girl-chaser, had met the sexy girl just a month earlier, he doubted he would have gone ahead with vows promising fidelity to the teenaged girl he made love to that night in a desultory manner, more depressed than aroused, beginning a shared marital disappointment, both regretting what they missed.

This marriage staggers on until collapsing under the strain of its miserable handicap, a bloom wilted by drought lurking within the mad swirl of life.  Its children become adults with a muted attraction to excitement, also marrying young, partners decent, dull, comfortable, marriages with built-in robes, built-in yawns.  Then, one after another, each of these partnerships falls into ruin.

He knew people, mostly women, successful in other areas of life, who followed sexual urges, believing in gods (or goddesses) of their destiny out there somewhere just needing that chance meeting to charge their lives with ecstasy, but no sooner did these romantics meet the equivalents of that sexy girl at his wedding than their passions on pedestals , the wild loves of their dreams, began teetering.  Vanity, selfishness, fickle-hearted unreliability and other flaws, elbowed scorching lust aside, these people reported, convincing him.  Now, those long-ago doubts quashed, heart-thudding moments recalled drained of youth’s impetuousity, the lighted windows of trains passing in the night, he wonders with a feeling akin to grief, about timing, unzipping a tight black dress.

…

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.