Confessions of Sins, Sharpening of Knives

There's little doubt in my mind now that making relationships work is a function of patience, maturity and a little bit of judgement. Then, of course, there's the little issue of timing - timing that surreptitiously but unerringly tugs away at the things you need the most, timing that serves as a persistent, mocking reminder for all those times when you allowed yourself to be filled with optimism thinking of an indeterminate future, timing that claws away furiously at everything you've constructed and shreds it down to a set of characterless, once-bloody stumps.

So please know that if anyone, however genuinely, supremely and indisputably wonderful they might be, starts talking as if their personal experience with relationships validates any notion of sincerity, fidelity, responsibility and love conquering all, I will want to take the conversation off the record and share with them an open secret, spoken freely on the streets but never even whispered in the repulsively smug corridors of self-congratulatory people in their late 20s who suddenly find themselves tenderly in love - that it's a big world out there and sometimes, despite all your best efforts, despite however much you honestly fulfill virtually everything another person asks of you, events get out of your control and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, except pick yourself up, go to the back of the line and hope - because it's nothing more than that - hope that, somehow, it'll be your time at some point in the same indeterminate future that you've spent the last several years preparing for.