The Girl Across the Park

A filmmaker friend called me up one night asking me to help him flesh out a story idea he had just come up with. The story is about a young man sitting on a park bench who notices across from him a girl, presumably young and attractive, looking forlorn, sad and day-dreamily distracted. Fascinated by the girl, he sits around mulling over whether or not he should approach her. The girl leaves, and as the man walks over to where she was seated, he finds a black notebook – the girl’s diary, and in it is a quote that reads. “Knowing is not enough. You must act.” Clearly, it is a love story. The underlying conflict here is to chase or not to chase, to reveal or not to reveal our true intentions to our object of affection. The choice of whether to hasten to love or to sit back and think about what it could be like to love and be loved in return, is presented to him. 

My friend proposed two possible endings to his tale. One where our protagonist bides his time pondering the pros and cons of a possible relationship, and hatches his plans, while he’s doing all this the young woman commits suicide because her loneliness becomes too painful to bear. In an alternative ending they become a couple and she is pregnant with his child.

Why is it that so many men (and women) choose not to pursue the person they hold in rapture?

The more enamored we become, the harder it is to move. The nature of infatuation and obsession, the hovering cousins of erotic love, have a paralytic effect on us; and after a while, it becomes safer to sit back, relax and recreate a more willing and more available caricature of the girl across the park in our thought life than to physically risk the palpitations, tight chest, sweaty palms and discomfort that the prospect of the real girl presents; or the sinking feeling that follows should she reject our advances.

In life, the only thing we have control of are our fantasies. Painful things happen, that’s for certain, family members die, we lose jobs, we lose our health, our looks, our tempers; boyfriends and girlfriends break up, marriages end in divorce, husbands and wives die, leaving us with a very real and permanent emptiness. The preservation of love, and the dignity of romance is almost impossible in day to day living, where there are bills to be paid, where there are erratic bosses and the grind of nine to five; where there are bad hair days, mood swings, crying babies, unruly teens, aging parents, bad habits, infidelity, pornography, menopause, weight gain, hair loss, balance sheets, annual leave, flat tires, leaking sinks, laundry, vacuum cleaners, debts, decisions about what film to watch, where to eat, where to go on holiday, broken heaters, broken hearts. The vagaries of life make a poor set for a romantic epic.

The most wonderful thing about the girl on the bench across from us is that she will never be a part of this mundane script called life. She will never have to see us frazzled, burnt out and moody, and we will never have to smell her morning breath or look at her bloody tampon in the trash. Why run the risk of repelling her with our frailties? Why run the risk of her repelling us by displaying the symptoms common to women in love? What do we do with her once she ceases to entertain us and becomes ordinary? If the girl becomes our girlfriend or wife, we know there will be days, weeks, maybe even years when we look at her in all her familiarity and predictability and wonder if we are still in love with her. Days when we feel not an ounce of curiosity, or wonder, or tenderness towards her. We will no longer be free to dream even livelier and more gallant dreams about her. And on those days we might almost hate ourselves for thinking so lowly of her, and for being so unchivalrous. But that sad day will never happen as long as she stays on her side of the park and we stay on ours.

As long as we do not cross that dangerous field, she will never let us down. While reality leaves us beaten and exhausted, gasping for air and struggling to make sense of it all, she, in all her unreality offers us a sanctuary in our inner worlds. The unknown, as yet unloved girl, holds all the promise of a life that could be, if only we were more than human; the promise of heaven if only we were desirable enough, strong enough, pure enough, brave enough, patient enough and good enough. It is the untainted image we hold of her that spurs us on to become better human beings. It is the dream of the life unlived that helps us get through the one we are stuck in.

Our fantasy is the closest image of God that we will ever have. A God that requires nothing from us but blind faith. She is an immaterial God whom we cannot touch, whose core we cannot invade. Therefore our callous humanness cannot destroy her. The extent of this God’s love is entirely up to us. We can imagine that her love for us is as deep as the ocean and as constant as the tides. We can imagine her loving only us with complete surrender. A passionate, powerful and beautiful woman-god, sensitive and delightful in everyway, who longs for us with an animal passion and gentleness, and who loves us with a loyalty so fierce that she would lay her life down for us.

I say imagine, because it is only in the imagination that romantic and passionate love of such intensity can survive without burning us alive. The real world is much too harsh for such heroics. Ideals often have a slim chance of surviving the rigorous test of reality. The girl across the park is the muse of artists, writers and musicians, and if she were to enter the real world and materialize before us, she might turn to dust. Her very power lies in her non-existence, her elusiveness. Shana Alexander, the first woman writer for Life Magazine observed, “The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.”

The girl across the park is the only sure thing we’ve got in this lifetime. She is incapable of letting us down because she doesn’t know our love exists, so she expects nothing. She cannot reject us, she cannot hurt us, she cannot leave us; and we will never have to stop loving her.

“Knowing is not enough. You must act.” Perhaps it is in the inaction that most of the action takes place, as it goes with most of us, it is in the day dreaming of our ideal partners, or our ideal careers, our ideal home, that we find our salvation, inspiration, enthusiasm and hope. The act of dreaming is much more pleasurable than any other activity. “There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.” Says English Enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke.

“Knowing is not enough. You must act.” It was written in the girl’s dairy. Perhaps, immaterial as she was, she knew that it was on her part that action had to be taken, less we end up immobilized by illusion. If no life comes out of her, then she can retain her immortal perfection in our mind’s eyes and live on forever in our hearts.

copyright 2008, Michele Koh