By Alyssa Velazquez
Elm Staff Writer
As a little girl, I was very impatient and independent, two qualities that in adulthood have gotten me into a couple scrapes, but as a child were positively deadly.
At the age of three, I was enrolled in my first ballet class. My mom would take me, watch as I threw my body around to a beat only I could hear, and after I had slipped off my tiny ballet flats, would drive me home.
One day, however, she didn’t stay and watch. I can’t remember the errand that had caused her to both miss my rhythmically-challenged choreography and be 10 minutes late in picking me up from the studio, but at the time it didn’t matter. Sitting there, swinging my legs back and forth staring at the clock was unbearable, so I made up my mind that day to walk home. I waited until the owner’s back was turned, snuck up the stairs, and opened the door that led to the main road. My childhood perception calculated that the distance from the studio to home couldn’t be more than 10 minutes, so I began to walk.
To a passersby I would have caused a double take; a little girl wearing nothing more than a black leotard, pink tights, and white sneakers with her hair in two pigtails and a dance bag dangling from her shoulder was not a common sighting on any road in Newfield, NJ. But I personally was not concerned. Though I was young, I remember walking so defiantly. In my mind, despite the fact that my mother had forgotten me, I would persevere.
Then I saw the car.
It came flying down the opposite side of the highway I was walking along and made a sudden U-turn, placing itself right along side me. The door opened and there was my mother. She had been speeding because she knew she was running late to pick me up, only to find her first-born little girl walking alongside a heavily trafficked area. As soon as the car stopped she yelled, “Get in the car!” and didn’t talk for the rest of the drive home.
At the time, I couldn’t see what I had done wrong. I thought I was helping her out; I was safe, and nothing had happened to me. But that night and the nights preceding “the incident,” I was subject to the harshest punishments I have ever received at the hands of my parents. Unbeknownst to me, I had committed a crime and was now being forced to live with my punishments. I lived that way for an entire week, miserable and confused, cursing my parents for subjecting me to an unfair lifestyle that I perceived would go on for eternity. At the time of judgment they had told me that they were doing this because they loved me. Love was the source of my pain and–as if masochism wasn’t bad enough–love had added murder to its track record.
Since that incident, I have often pondered the consequences one faces at the hands of love, whether it be from family, friends, or lovers. If we reflect back on the way we acted in a past relationship, towards someone who loved us, or someone that we believed ourselves to be in love with, could our actions then account for any unhappiness that exists in our current love life? Must we be punished for our previous misdemeanors in love? Until recently, my last serious relationship was first semester freshman year. After three years of being single with no prospects, I began to think I had offended Cupid with my past relationship behaviors or attitudes and now I was being punished. I had committed a crime against the heart, and my sentence was 15 years to no love life, with no prospect of dating parole. I was being sentenced to the “single penalty.”
But does love really work that way? Is there a judiciary branch to love? And if Cupid acts as the judge, do men and women in relationships continue to be unfairly tried? Or is it all just luck, and in the case of being alone, bad luck? After the initial few days of my mother not even being able to look at me because she was so upset, I began to contemplate running away. I had my Barbie suitcase all packed when she came in asking what I was doing. I told her I was leaving and she hugged me.
That’s the funny thing about relationships. Just when you think you’re all alone, that the universe is conspiring against you, and relationship karma is a reality intent on making you miserable, someone gives you a hug. And in that moment, there is only love.