By Alyssa Velazquez
Elm Columnist
In the past, I have given thanks to your gracious patronage touched upon timing, culture, circumstances, trust, standards, and many other aspects of relationships that I had found in need of a good common sense kick in the pants. For the past year and a half that I have been having this symbiotic relationship with love’s accoutrements and you, the readers. In this time, although I had crossed paths with the essence of fate, I had never felt comfortable facing it head on. Fate’s presence always caused negative reactions within me. My brow would furrow and instinctively I would glance behind me, as if fate had been following me all this time and I had been trying to give it the old run around, to no avail.
If you read my first article of the semester or have heard through word of mouth, you know that I was in Egypt throughout the earliest stages of the Revolution. It is this recent chapter of my life that determined that fate and I needed to have a sit down. For only I would encounter, more than six thousand miles away from home, during the onset of a people’s revolution, in a culture that frowns upon opposite sex interactions, a knight in shining armor. As a standard of description for a writer, the cliché may seem far too adolescent and childlike–even border line Hallmark– but then again, to a girl who experienced foreign fears and uncertainty for more than two weeks, that’s exactly what he was. Yet not all was fair in my bout with love and war. Suddenly, fate and chance had come into my love life more prominently than ever, and in the end both sided against me.
Now I find myself back in the States with an ever-prevailing question: does everything really happen for a reason? If so, then what is it about the “reason” that has the authority to predetermine my love life? Is fate one of the good guys or merely Cupid’s overshadowed and overbearing brother, whose vocation in life is to make our love lives as painful as possible? Are relationships spontaneous or predetermined? Is free will or fate an antecedent of love?
For propriety’s sake on the behalf of the above-mentioned male, I will for the rest of this article, and hopefully in subsequent subject matters to come, refer to him as Knight. I figure if Carrie Bradshaw can have an adjective (Mr. Big) for the love of her life, I can at least have a noun for a prospective boyfriend.
Of course, as with all love stories that bear uncanny resemblances to cinema magic, I met Knight in the midst of turmoil. It was a group of mutual friends that would become my life support through the statewide curfews and bouts of cabin fever. However, with the distinct division between the sexes due to cultural norms and having little to no one-on-one time with each other, the “normal” steps a couple goes through in getting to know each other were thrown aside.
It was the night before I was due to leave on a plane to one of three safe havens pre-assigned for the emergency evacuations. We were sitting outside in the courtyard–just the two of us, wicker chair distance apart–when Knight, while looking up into the sky at the numerous stairs suspended above our heads, said, “I wish things had been different, but I have to follow my gut and believe that everything happens for a reason.” Reason, fate, destiny. Everyone from my parents to Knight seemed to agree that these existential nouns had brought me to Egypt for a purpose, yet now they were pushing me out. It was official: Cupid’s older brother had turned me into a fate yo-yo. Even the stars seemed to be experiencing fluctuations of light in agreement to Knight’s statement. I felt utterly helpless and all I could do was sit there and accept it.
During the entire twelve-hour plane ride back to Newark, New Jersey, all I could think about was fate. Does everything really happen for a reason? Was I meant to meet Knight only for the sole purpose of a juicy love story for this very paper, or a fond memory to look back upon when I am older? Were we in fact one of the exceptions, like a non-fiction epic love story? Maybe he was merely the motivation I needed to get out of my single state of being. I still have yet to decide which is the most plausible theory; the “reason” is still unknown, and Cupid’s brother lives to bring pain to someone else’ day.
Despite our story and continental distance, neither of us is giving up just yet. “Everything” and perchance brought us into contact with each other and we are going to do “everything” to keep that contact; only then will I be satisfied with what happens for a reason.
February 18, 2011
Volume LXXXI Issue 15