The Suitors

 

 

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

 

      Eleanor wakes up with a smile this morning.

     Today is her 34th birthday, and today, she has decided that she would no longer be afraid of loving someone again. In fact, she's so ready to be in a relationship that she will say yes to the first suitor that will visit her today. Her friends and her hobbies, used to take most of her time, are now boring her. Her fears of being cheated on again and being taken advantage of a man again, she’s setting those fears aside.

     But she hopes it will be Jude because she likes him a lot. But it’s okay if it‘d be Desmond as she likes him, too. And Bill, she’d been her crush for many years, too. Any of the three, she’d be happy to be with, and she promises that she’d make him happy, too,  and so she gets up from bed, she takes a bath, and waits in the living room.

     She sits near the window where she can see her garden filled with roses and the gate where the man she would love would enter.

     But six hours have passed and no suitor has visited her.

     Maybe her ex-suitors, whom she has rejected would visit her today. She would also say yes to any of them. Chuck, a married man who’s been lusting after her for years, if he’d leave his wife for her, yes, she’d go with him.

    She’s oh-so eager to be in a relationship now—she has wasted too much time.

   Ten hours have passed, and finally, she sees a man entering her gate.

    The strange tall and lean man, garbed in black suit and barefooted, who has a pale face and scrawny hands and toes, stands in front of her.

    “Happy birthday, Eleanor,” he greets her. “I’m sorry to say that no one is coming today.”

    And that makes her frown.

    “You see, Jude has been dead for twenty years, heart attack, he died lonely and his last word was your name,” he says. “And Desmond, he got married to a loving wife thirty years ago and is now suffering from dementia, and until now, keeps uttering your name. Bill, well, forty years ago, since he failed to win the heart of the woman she loved, he decided to be a woman and named himself, or herself, Eleanor. Chuck, he’s also dead, killed by the husband of a woman he was trying to seduce thirty years ago. The woman’s name was Eleanor.”

   “Twenty? Thirty? Forty years ago? What are you talking about?”

   “Look in the mirror, Eleanor.”

    She does, she looks at the mirror—and sees a woman whose face has been ravaged with wrinkles.

    “You’re eighty years old now, Eleanor,” the man said. “And this morning, you died in your sleep, spending your last minutes dreaming, a dream where you regret the time you wasted and the petty fears you had, wishing you could turn back the time. Anyway, you’d go to heaven where you’d meet some of your friends again, and where you can go back to your cherished hobby of gardening.”

     Eleanor’s face brightens up, she giggles and follows the man into her garden and out the gate, hopping so she won’t trample on her precious roses.