GLAD TO BE UNHAPPY

Fools rush in, so here I am
Very glad to be unhappy
I can't win, but here I am
More than glad to be unhappy

As Wilf lay on the couch, watching the late afternoon light, he marvelled at just how easy it was to waste entire days in an agonizing reverie of unrequited love. If he was a buddhist monk meditating on a lengthy retreat, people would surely applaud him for his spiritual fortitude.

But he was in love and no-one was at all interested in that.

His parents often passed by him as if he was merely an unwelcome obstacle to the TV guide that was wedged beneath where he lay in happy despair.

"You've barely moved for days," said his mother who tugged at the guide beneath his sneakers, before eventually releasing it.

Wilf could barely find the energy to answer his mother who seemed frustrated at her son's unexplained lethargy.

"Maybe it's time you saw the doctor. It's not drugs is it?"

He sighed, irritated by being compelled to converse while he was in such a delicate emotional state.

"It's a drug, yes. But not of the recreational variety."

His mother's face turned ashen.

"What do you mean?"

"Oh for God's sake mother. I surely don't need to spell it out for you."

"Well, yes. I think you most probably do."

Wilf rolled his eyes, frustrated at his mother's inability to take a hint.

"I'm lovesick."

"Oh. Well, I just hope she's worth you wasting all these endless nights agonising over."

She was worth it alright, Wilf thought to himself. If the pain he felt loving her from a distance was a measure of his feelings, then he must be Superman. How he'd been able to withstand the agony of knowing she'd likely never reciprocate his effection made him think he was becoming the romantic equivalent of a spartan, hardening himself to the bleak, hopeless situation by the hour, by the minute.

If love, then, was his kryptonite, he would need to find some way to recover his powers eventually. And there was sure to be a Lex Luthor out there, beguiling the object of his affection all the while he laid in this forlorn romantic stupor. For now, however, he was sort of glad to be unhappy. Yes, he was certainly well aware of the cliches of fatalistic infatuation. He'd read Goethe's The Sorrows Of Young Werther the previous summer on holiday in Cornwall, but more as a how to manual than as a cautionary tale.

Would the threat of suicide convince her to love him? Probably not, but he would at least have demonstrated his feelings in a meaningful way that would leave an indelible impression on her.

"Look. I can see you've fallen hard, but we would quite like to watch TV tonight," his meek looking father said matter of factly.

"I'm not stopping you!"

Both his parents sat beside his oustretched form on the crescent sofa, eating their dinner off trays. The sheer mundanity of their suppertime ritual prompted Wilf to finally get up and go for a walk.

Outside, a light summer rain was gently blotting the pavement before him. There was a scent of lime blossoms close by and Wilf found himself intoxicated by the atmopshere that aligned itself perfectly with his mood of contented heartbreak.

Perhaps this was the best way to love the girl of his unrequited dreams. From a distance and untarnished by a reality that might inevitably have them both eating their dinner off trays in front of the TV.

God, he didn't want that. Love, thought Wilf, should be the greatest adventure of life, not something reduced to a toothless whimper of merely existing together.

If he had to suffer to maintain his epic feelings of the heart, then suffer he would. He refused to be commonplace about it and so he would soldier on with his invisible wounds.

Walking up a steep hilly path toward a nearby common, Wilf, eventually arrived at the wildflower covered summit, taking in the complete panorama of the rural town down below as the first of the street lights flickered into life.

He could see her house in the distance and as he gazed upon it, he thought of her like a princess in a turret-less castle that he had yet to find his way to.

Stretched out in the limestone grassland, like Clark Kent in Smallville, he wondered if he truly wanted to chance his hand with an impossible reality or remain forever and sweetly in love from a distance.

Being young, it was a dilemma he could afford to entertain for a good while yet.