By Mark Marchillo Odd Man Out
Lately the words wish and dream have taken on a sort of double meaning. Seen or read “The Secret,” anyone? Funny how falling in love can change your dreams. And what you wish for… well, let’s just say wishing on stars is an old habit of mine. It’s one of those things people laugh at you for when you say it aloud. But I wonder if they’re laughing because they can relate.
All of us are looking. Like the song goes, in all the wrong places. A psychic once read my palm and declared the love of my life was someone from my past. The old fraud. If she’d really seen my past she’d have run the other way, too.
But life is cyclical, I am afraid. What goes around, right JT? Around and around. That must be why we’re always looking behind us for what’s coming next. For that one love to come back around. The world we boys live in is small, as many thousands of us as there are.
Problem being, when we run into that love, the true one, we’re too busy running to realize. We’re boys. We run, that’s what we do. On to the next. And the next. NEXT! I mean, we’re screaming it before we’ve even got our pants back on. Not that they were ever all the way off… The scene is a vast chaos of dizzying lights and dizzier twinks, so many people. So many crazy. So scary. I once looked into the eyes of a boy and saw my heart. And then I knew. He was the one. But running had become a disease with me. It ate away at me until I single-handedly destroyed the relationship (with his help). After all, I can’t take all the credit. No. We never do. Well, maybe just this once.
Thing is, I think he knew, too. But again, love came too early. What we don’t see is that love can never come too early. Too early… it’s like having ice cream first. No such thing as too early. So why run? And then look back in a couple of years, in all the old places for those eyes… where are they now? Looking into my heart, showing me what I’m made of, making me a hero. I search, now, for those eyes. For I’ve become what I saw in them. But they can’t see me anymore.
Such irony we find in our own lives. Such journey. Where to now? More wishes, less dreams. The dreams of yesteryear have turned to clutter next to the new dream of love. You wonder what’s the point.
Here it is. Feel safe with someone. I urge you. I dare you. Safe is always a risk. Because it means committing to it, resigning, if you will, to it. Finish the race. The race is won — now what?
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 26, 2007. Read the original PDF.