500 Days To Marry

500 DAYS TO MARRY

I was at Arizona Charlie one night trying my luck on their slot machine. And suddenly, a woman sat next to my seat. A few minutes of playing later, she stood and turned around her machine to leave but looked at me and saw me looked at her at that same moment. She then returned back to her seat and played some more.

I should talked to her but my heart was still getting over some girl, even after a whole two months since I last saw her.

I may have seen Chelsea on Valentine's Day sitting alone. She looked the same as that last time. But I didn't stop by her and went my own way. It wouldn't be proper to present yourself to people with a fresh wound, with my heart still bleeding like the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Anyway, the girl in the casino, she was sort of beautiful, more beautiful or as beautiful as Chelsea when I glanced at her face as I left my machine. Again I should have talked to her, but I wasn't ready to find a new romance and I gave myself "500 Days To Marry." 500 Days to find the girl and marry her. And again I was still sort of bereaving over the lost of my true love. Of course, it was true love or I'm a monkey's uncle and pigs have already flown and I don't know about it. And moreover, I don't know how much more truer love can be.

Anyway, the girl at the casino was probably around 26, just like the age of that girl I told you about when I went to eat lunch with my parents last month.

I know what a 26 year old woman look like. My supervisor told everyone one day when she was asked how old she was on a wedding reception in a restaurant which everyone in the office attended, including me.

I've talked to her in her cubicle office and she talked of her family, not her own because she was single. She might also have seen my few doodles of "Joanne" on my day calendar in my desk. Then on her last day, she brought her fiance and introduced him to my new supervisor.

Her eyes and mine looked at each other across two desks and I seemed to have read through those eyes "I wish he was you."

There was another girl in the office who I knew liked me. Her desk was next to mine. She admitted she was the one who playfully put the Post-it note with a message I can't remember now behind my office shirt one day.

Ena showed me her picture when she was younger. And she always liked to play Tic-Tac-Toe with me when I asked her. Then she said she was going to marry a co-worker. Then she didn't invite me to her wedding reception in a restaurant, when almost everybody else was invited. It's a bride's prerogative.

I was sort of like Peter Pan when it came to love back then. I was naive or Cupid wouldn't dare shoot me with his love arrow. And if I sort of like a girl, like Serenity, I didn't know what to do. I was waiting for Cupid's arrow.

I didn't know what love was. And I didn't have anybody to tell me what to do if it got me.

It was many years later when love got me. And love showed me what to do.

500, 499, 498, 497, 496, ....

John Sindayen