cDearest Esther, here I am writing you this letter. Many times I thought I wanted to read a few words from you about my tragic “relationships”, made up of serial traitors, of which I happened to to be both the betrayed and the lover. In short, all men of mud. Anyway I introduce myself, I have 26 years old, I’m a beautiful girl, so after years of suffering I finally decide to believe in myself and get back into the game and meet him, “A”. A. is a nice boy, he lives in my city, he is sensitive, deep, good. But most of all, A. has serious intentions with me, is one of those males who luckily has very little of the male I’ve met so far and I was talking about before. A. is one of those who falls in love with your flaws and makes you feel special. A. is already lost in me after only a month of dating, and he’s not afraid to say it so much that he tells all his friends about it. The fact is that I I live intense and beautiful moments with him, but I have a bit of indecision.
The real problem comes when the Christmas holidays arrive and he introduces me his best friend, such a L., who has lived outside Italy for years and returns to the city only on holidays. L. is handsome (but not so much more than him), likeable (but not so much more than him), and yet, as it happens, i like him better.
The meeting with his best friend
I had already noticed L. months before during the summer and already at the time I would have liked to meet him, but I had never been able to talk to him. And now what was my “unfulfilled dot” of the summer I unexpectedly find him as the best friend of the one I’m dating. I, in the guise of “his best friend’s girl”, finally talk to him and I find out that I like L.. While we talk he tells me that he likes me a lot, “as a person” specifies immediately after. She asks me if he and I have ever seen each other around, she wonders why she had never seen and known me, then he tells me that I’m nice and “more beautiful than A. had described to you”.
THEn short, L. gives me the final blow to an already messed up head of his own. I want to specify that these two are really friends, and that I believe that the sentences he addressed to me did not have an excessive malice: I believe that if L. knew that I had a crush on him, he would send me to hell to preserve the friendship with A. But I also think that there could have been something between me and L. if A hadn’t been there, and that perhaps L. also thought about it while we were talking and we got on well. I feel like a monster, but right now I just wish I hadn’t met A.as nice as it was to meet him, to be able to have the green light with L.
Why do I have to choose?
So, dear Ester, I ask myself: why is it always so difficult? But what am I supposed to do now? close with both, take this secret to my grave and forget both A. and L.? Staying with A., who has all the will to stay with me and who deep down I like, and forget about L. who lives so far away from us and we only meet a few times a year? Or be honest, risk everything as you do at 26, come out to L. (whom I know very little) and break A’s heart who would hate me? I do not know. Doubt hurts me. A. calls me and I don’t know what to say to him, meanwhile perhaps L. has already left and I won’t see him again for quite a while. One day I wake up and I would like to take a plane to reach L., other times I calm down and I think she will soon be able to forget him. In short, my year has already started with tears at night and indecision, but why can’t I be calm and happy for once?
Esther Viola’s answer
Esther Purple
Dear P,
Nothing, you see that not even the knife of the handle is of any use, one doesn’t have fun, one cuts oneself anyway, makes assumptions and doesn’t choose.
But then what advice, what do you do with advice if you then need the strength to follow them. The advice they give you is excellent too, strength cannot be sold on the market. Even if you want to decide scrupulously, it’s a waste of time. If there’s one sure thing about love, it’s that behavior almost never follows first intentions: what we want to do hardly coincides with what we’ll do.
Choosing is a luxury
half glassor full: among the various troubles, the best has happened to you, the excess of alternatives.
“You can love several people at the same time. It is a truth that one often discovers when one dies,” he wrote Louis-Ferdinand Celine in Letters to friends. You were lucky. With Great Truths there is no choice, it happens as it happens: either you know how to use them or someone finds a way to make you suffer them. Or they hit your forehead, of course, there’s also this other possibility.
How do you choose, ask this love letter column, sort of. And who knows. Choosing is nobody’s art, P., an almost impossible manoeuvre, that’s why you don’t even try. It resembles a retreat, “impossible to carry it out without making rubbish”, Baricco once wrote.
“Choosing well” is fantasy
If we knew what to choose, we would have chosen a long time ago. You would need the intuition of your septuagenarian self to know which of the two is the must-have. At most you can try to do one of those useless simulation tests, but you would need the pain of loss: “indispensable” is one of those illuminations that only comes when the house is unkempt. Great love is always discovered at the autopsy, little to do.
We will not find answers here, we might as well proceed to self-absolution immediately. Remembering that the future is as it comes: if it goes well with you, you will have done well. If it goes wrong, it wasn’t up to you.
Life does what it wants to us. Let me know how it goes.
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