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Saturday, October 3
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Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colourful, marvelous feathers. In short, he was a creature made to fly about freely in the sky, bringing joy to everyone who saw him.
One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She watched his flight, her mouth wide in amazement, her heart pounding, her eyes shining with excitement. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird.
But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains!
And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she felt envy, envy for the bird's ability to fly.
And she felt alone.
And she thought: "I'm going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again."
The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage.
She looked at the bird everyday. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: 'Now you have everything you could possibly want.' However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest.
The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.
One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.
If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realised that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, his energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.
Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. "Why have you come?" she asked Death.
"So that you can fly once more with him across the sky," Death replied. "If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him even more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again,"
I have finished reading Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho. It is such a wonderfully sad, yet meaningful book. It is about a girl who willingly goes into prostitution although her ultimate goals of her life is to find love, get married and have children. One day, she sees a man and falls in love with him - or rather, they fall in love with one another.
The man is young, rich, famous and handsome. He also knows that she is a prostitute but he really loves her. She however, is convinced that their relationship is based on freedom and chooses to leave him and go back to her country (which is Brazil - story takes place in Switzerland). She believes that to really and truly love someone, she cannot possess him because then it would make their 'dream-like love' into reality, and once committed, the onslaught of having children, mistresses, affairs and losing interest would start.
But of course the story ends happily with the man intercepting her stopover in Paris with a bunch of roses.
Me, being utterly practical, have managed to sift through all the sad and meaningful proses in the story to get the main point of what the author is trying to say, hence the way I put it here is not doing the book justice. In fact, I probably make it sound like just another chick lit when it is far, FAR from it.
And this story has actually made me rethink my relationship with The Boyfriend, making me wonder if I have really experienced true love before. I realised that every time I think of The Boyfriend, I actually do think of the first time when I saw him - that first time when we barely spoke.
True love can only be defined by your own limits and boundaries, for everyone's aspect of love is different. But in order to experience true love, you must be able to know yourself well and deep.
I for one don't think I know myself very well. The Boyfriend knows me much better than I ever expect him to, and I must admit, even better than myself.
Our relationship is not like the lady and her bird - since The Boyfriend is not much of a 'flying' type, more of a 'homely' type, there is really no need for me to cage him up and really he is pretty much free to do whatever he wants.
Usually he wants me.
One thing is for sure - never ever prevent a man from doing sports.
Other than sex, which guarantees body and soul contact with another person, sports is the only other activity a man can do that also has bodily contact, albeit with another man. That is why The Boyfriend is in KL for the weekend watching some tennis match.
Yeah, go read Eleven Minutes. It is a darn good read.
the angels they burn inside for us|3:50:00 PM|
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