A Fairytale of Love by Beate Sigriddaughter

“I love you,” Elaine wrote. “I always have.” But when I wouldn’t give her my phone number because her frequent unplanned hour-long phone calls had exasperated me in the past, she once again broke off all communication. What worried me besides my limited cell phone minutes was this: Eliane insisted that in 1991 when she visited me after a spat with her girlfriend, the two of us made love. I happen to know we didn’t because I had really wanted to. I am convinced that if we had made love I would have noticed and remembered. Instead I remember sitting on the swings up in the park by the city dump after she left, flinging myself high into the blue New Mexico sky, regretting that she had decided to go back to her unnerving girlfriend without ever giving me a chance. Now, twenty years later, she wants to shame me into remembering things her way. “I take it I wasn’t very memorable,” she challenged me. How was I expected to respond? “OK, OK, you did make love to me,” so as not to hurt her tender feelings? What really worries me is of course how many other people make up stuff about me against my will. How many folks imagine and insist on my reality the way it never happened? I’m living in a fairytale, I guess, though this isn’t how I imagined fairytales.

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