by Michelle Hayward
I once had a relationship with a man who would regularly send
handwritten postcards through the mail, and scribble little love notes within the
pages of books; how lovely it was to get to page 96 and find an unexpected message
inscribed in the margin of my current read.
Yet despite all this attention to detail, I was shocked when the
same guy failed to acknowledge my birthday. He said it was the everyday gestures that
mattered in life – that he’d rather express his feelings when it felt right
rather than to mark the reoccurring date of a past event. And in light of his usual thoughtfulness, how
could anyone argue with that? I totally got
it - he was absolutely right! Although I still wasn’t clear why the miserable
rotten bastard had accepted a birthday card and gift from me two months earlier?
Detecting my dissatisfaction, he scurried off and returned
with a large flat box. Intrigue rapidly
turned to horror as I unveiled a giant padded birthday card, embossed with a
hybrid elephant-bear. I was curious, and quite frankly annoyed, as to why he
thought I was a gigantic padded-card mule-bear type of gal in the first place? (And
I’m not going to make you relive the bastardisation of the poetic form
encountered inside the thing – we’ve all had cause to visit the dark place that
is Hellmark.)
Look, I’m hardly an arbiter of good taste myself, but I
really don’t do cute. How could he not know that? How could such a seemingly profound person,
send such a vomit inducing nylon card to me?
I wondered if my demands had altered his perception of me. I began to
hope he found nylon teddy-bear pictures appealing; it was better than thinking
I did. But then did I really want to spend my life with a man who found nylon
teddy-bear pictures appealing? Perhaps
he was trying to prove a point – of course he was being ironic!
The whole fiasco culminated in me melting down into a semiotic
crisis of contradictions. Sending the
wrong card became more damaging than not sending a card at all. Believe it or not, I don’t usually care much
for my own personal anniversaries, but perhaps on this occasion, I made it
matter. I didn’t really care about a birthday
card; I wanted to know if he loved me. The card suggested he did (‘I LOVE YOU’
was written on the front). But now the
card had put me right off the man.
I took his postcards out of the drawer. They were standard blank postcards containing
a few fairly innocuous words ‘Thinking of you always xx’. I flicked back
through the novel notes - the same. I
realised it was the method in which the messages had been presented that had impressed
me, rather than the messages themselves. Paradoxically, that’s how greeting
cards generally function – their sentiment is expressed in the act of sending
the message, rather than writing it.
In the end, this issue was more than our relationship could
withstand; a fluffy animal – an unexpected everyday gesture, eradicated all
hope of irony. All the same, I do regret
repeatedly stabbing his forever hippo-bear with my eye-liner pencil.
Afterwards, I told everyone we had separated because we were
unable to settle our artistic differences.
He told everyone I was a nightmare psycho bitch from hell and told me
never to darken his door again...