She watched for him: Love in the Time of Cholera...a lingering memory...one of many

N—l well up at the end of?Les Misérables?despite how many times I have read or watched it. I even teared up at the end of its musical version.?I feel like I am moving in the same direction with?Love in the Time of Cholera.?

L—No it is a happy ending!

N—What? You killed it for me. Why did you do that? For God’s sake, this is why I have not watched the movie!

L—I only assumed.??

N—(Pissed) he knows she is lying! She fibs and he usually lets it go.?

L- Hun, I only meant that it does not end like?Les Miserables!

Could have she made it worse?! He ends the conversation…at least now there is a doubt that the ending is not totally burned…he needs that…he is left with many surging emotions though.??He has not been very happy with her choices…this is only one bead of a whole string…

He has been savoring the novel for quite some time now…he read, reread, “triple-read,” and certainly “quadruple-read,” if you will, lines, paragraphs and pages…his experience with reading this novel comes closer to lovemaking than it does to reading…her simple statement destroys a climax that has been long brewing inside him…

He tries to channel the negative energy of his disappointment into doing something positive (the story of his life)…he reaches for the book…only thirty pages left…Gabo has been elusive not to give the ending away for the past three hundred eighteen pages…one paragraph through, and he discovers that it was going to be “a happy ending.”?

Only the details are left for him to read…he would have known the ending, had he not fallen asleep with the novel on his chest 10 seconds earlier in the wee hours of dawn…his eyes speed down the lines and storm through the remaining pages…

He does not really know which is racing faster his mind or his heart…he reaches a state where he cannot define how the novel ends for him…is it a zenith or a climax? They are not the same…the latter is followed by orgasmic relief…he does not know…he only knows that he identifies with Florentino Arisa…

Love brings as much sadness and disappointment as it does happiness.??Actually, love does not bring anything that life does not. It only intensifies one’s sense of what life brings through passion. When one falls in love, he enjoys whatever life brings either immediately or later on…

One day, this experience will become a happy memory…a teasing moment…he would not have come to this epiphany had not she set him on the journey. After all, she only said: “it is a happy ending.” Was it though??