An ending

The African sun was hot and my arm burning from hanging it out the window. Earlier that day there had been elephants and zebra barely a foot away, a monkey had mischievously cracked the window down trying to find food the evening before and my seat was wet with morning dew. At sunrise a lion blocked our path as we pulled our rental car out of the campsite and into the animal reserve. It was now mid afternoon and the air sizzled. The wildlife had naturally hidden away in the shade so we had driven without a glimpse of anything for the past hour. My irritation with him was rising as quickly as the thermostat.

For years I was desperate to make this pilgrimage to South Africa. And convinced that the man I pined for on the other side of the ocean was my soul mate. Not having him, I had told myself as year after year went by apart, was the source of my unhappiness.


It had once been as simple as a glass marble found at a toyshop. Something strangers had touched and held before. Yet it was only meant for us. It had waited patiently amongst the others, drawing little attention to its self, lost in a cool sea of glass.

We were at Hamley's on Regent Street in London. We wandered from floor to floor; shooting laser guns, playing video games, testing our skills on the giant piano floor mat. Suddenly he stopped, transfixed. “Marbles!” he exclaimed with a childlike enthusiasm typically lost by the tender age of seven. He was nineteen and in many ways far more mature than the irresponsible college boys I knew back home. Yet, he still exuded an innocence that I clung to, desperate to feel what seemed to come so natural to him.

And now, he insisted on buying me a marble at a toy store.

There was a pureness to our love. A simplicity. And it was ours alone. It was as if no one in history had possibly experienced love before but rather it was a feeling we created, within a world that belonged to us alone. We could wrap ourselves in its elegant softness; caress the silk that engulfed our newly discovered existence. Over the years I carried the painful memory of its extinction tightly in my hand, my fingers wrapped around that marble as if it was the most precious artifact in the world.

Now here I was, five years later and halfway around the world hoping desperately to experience that sort of magic again. “Are you mad?” he asks. “You know I was just joking with you.” I stare out the window and straight into the blaring sun, silently holding back the impending tears. I don’t even have the strength to argue with him anymore. We fought constantly, a sign to me that our relationship was real. Only someone I really cared about could make me as angry as he did. But the fact that I could hardly muster the intensity to fight back clearly meant something.

“I’m not mad, baby.” I reply, forcing a smile. There was no need to ruin our last day together. Despite all the plans and promises over the years, I knew he was never going to move to America and I hardly saw a life in South Africa as my future. Clutching my marble in my fist, I relax into my seat and watch the vast African terrain stretching out for miles.

I felt the strange sensation of being a child and discovering my parents, not Santa Claus, were putting the Christmas gifts beneath the tree. Swept up with mourning, I finally admit to myself that there is nothing left of my love other than a scrapbook of beautiful memories and a person who simply does not exist anymore.