Mid-Life Crisis Diaries by Geraldine Solon Page B

through the water. She closed her eyes and concentrated on how the water felt, flowing over the skin on her arms, and imagined that she was lying on the most amazing therapy couch in the world. Digging back through more than twenty years of marriage, she revisited the time when they were young, and a pang of sadness swept through her chest.
    “A younger version of myself, thank you. And who of us weren’t stupid when we were young?”
    “Hey now,” Andre said. “I resent that.”
    Marsha dipped her forehead back into the water a bit and laughed. “I didn’t mean you, of course! I forget that you’re young. My apologies. I was stupid, let’s put it that way. I was stupidly in love in the best way possible.” She breathed slowly and closed her eyes again. “The kind of love where nothing is like real life, but everything sure seems like it is. You think you’re an adult at nineteen, and that the world is your oyster. Really, though, you don’t recognize that the world doesn’t revolve around you. You don’t realize what you’re getting yourself into when you choose a partner. You think it’s all about looks, and how the person makes you feel. What I forgot to do, Andre, when I was young….was to make myself a whole person before I fell in love. I got married very young, after dating Blake for two years. When you date someone for two years as an almost twenty year old, you assume that you know everything there is to know about relationships.”
    Andre acknowledged her story with a gentle m-hmm .
    “What I wouldn’t even admit to myself for the longest time was that I fell in love with Blake’s looks, first. He was the handsomest thing I’d ever laid my eyes on, and I still feel that way about him.” Marsha knew Andre wouldn’t find any insult in the comment, so she continued without assuming that she’d just hurt his feelings.
    “Amazingly, I’m still attracted to him. Even now. I think he’s beautiful. He just lost his way somewhere in the last twenty five years…he lost most of that spark that I fell in love with second.”
    “Spark?” Andre asked, splashing his feet.
    “Oh yes. The man had a spark. I can’t quite describe it properly. It was like a drive, an amazing motivation, I guess you’d say.” Marsha righted herself in the water and looked toward Andre, running her fingers through her hair to clear it from her face. “Actually, he kind of reminds me of you.”
    Andre pulled himself upright as well and turned toward her, closing the distance between them a little but still giving her adequate space to feel out the rest of her story.
    “Blake was a very driven young man. He knew what he wanted, and often wanted several different things at once. Kind of a serial entrepreneur, but in a day job mentality. Does that make sense?”
    Andre shook his head lightly.
    “Well, he wanted to run an all natural dog food company once. But when he couldn’t find one that would let him come in as a manager, he gave up on it. He was twenty, mind you, and had no business running anything until he had life experience. But it was like he just couldn’t grab a hold of life fast enough. Whatever it was he wanted to do, he wanted to be the top dog and do all of it. Right then.” Marsha looked up at the sky, the yellows more evident now, and considered cutting her story short. She figured, though, that this was exactly part of the therapy Dr. Lee was hoping for, so she continued. “Nothing was good enough for him, eventually not even me. But at the very beginning, it was very intoxicating to be around someone who always wanted to move forward. It wasn’t my personality to think like that…as I always wanted to do things in the right order, if you will. But for him, it was always leap first, look later. And I thought that since opposites usually attract, he was the one for me. And I dove head first into loving his late night brainstorming sessions while we were dating, and his last minute trips to La