Lovers Are Crazy

Lovers are crazy, but they will never admit to it. If they are sane enough to admit to it, they probably will not be so crazy.

Here is a lover I knew. Whether she’s a little crazy or not, you be the judge. Her boyfriend had to travel to France for a physics project that required lengthy stay–about two months. She couldn’t accompany him due to her own graduate courses in New Jersey. Also they were saving up for their upcoming nuptial and she didn’t want to waste money on travel.

At first, she would incessantly paint her finger nails and toe nails. When I was talking with her at her place, she did that non-stop. So I said to her that she really didn’t need to do that so diligently since her boyfriend was not there, and she might take the opportunity to relax on the boring beauty routines. She told me that she couldn’t. The next time we met, she started to tell me about her previous boyfriend and the current boyfriend. At some point I tried to pull our conversation to something else, but she told me straightforwardly that we had to talk about her boyfriend since this would help her pull through.

Soon afterwards, when her boyfriend stopped responding for several days–due to his work on a special machinery that costs millions of dollars to build–she went berserk. She started to talk about Othello. At first I was innocently joining in. She’s from Eastern Europe and I’m from Asia. English is not our first language–Shakespeare can be rather enjoyable in its translated versions. I mean much more enjoyable than its original form, at least to me. Soon I realized that she was talking about her fantasy of strangling her unfaithful partner and she even suggested that we perform the last part of the play with the murder scene included in her apartment–that was too much for me. Without receiving his regular messages, she was sick of worrying and started to imagining him running away with a French girl.

She’s not the only one who went a little crazy about love. I knew this guy in college, but we were not friends, only acquaintance. He’s a scientist and very ambitious too. He married early and she’s the most popular girl in his hometown. At graduate school in Maryland, he dedicated most of his time in his lab. One day, he came back home and found that his wife left, with a note on the dinner table telling him that she ran away with his best friend, who’s studying journalism and communication in the graduate school of the same university. They ran away to Texas. He was furious and started to write furious emails to everybody he knew. In those days, social media was still in its infancy and he’s not accustomed to it. This is how I got to know his story. He even wrote to the global Asian news network. In his fury, he related a lot of details, which I am not at the liberty to reveal here. Although everybody felt uncomfortable about his sudden openness, we were all very sympathetic to his plight. His mother-in-law gave him 100% support, demanding him to go down to Texas and beating up his best friend and getting his wife back. He didn’t, but he kept on writing for quite a while and we all hoped that he could remarry and become normal again.

In my hometown, there’s a musical instrument that resembles a bugle in appearance, with a soaring sad sound that can almost pierce your ears. People would tell me that whenever the instrument is sounded in the vicinity, it means a pair of lovers cannot get approval from their respective families. They would either leave their ancestral home together or die together. The instrument is their last protest against the world which doesn’t understand them.