Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred.
Then, another thousand, and a second hundred.
Then, yet another thousand, and a hundred.
Then, when we have counted up many thousands,
Let us shake the abacus, so that no one may know the number, and become jealous when they see
How many kisses we have shared.
-Catullus
Once upon a time, I was in love with a man who was my soulmate. When I was 18.
It was a long time ago, recessiontime. Jobs were hard to come by; he had occasional bartender gigs at night, I worked as a sales girl behind the counter at the Hakaniemi market. I had to be at work at 6 AM, he came home from his job at 4 AM. We barely saw each other awake. There was no money. We had no furniture, just a mattress on the floor of our 17 square meter flat.. When we ate soup, sitting on the floor, we ate from the same plate as we only had one.
It sounds unreal now, but very real it was.
Sometimes I had to walk to work as we didn’t have money for the tram ticket – had I been busted without a ticket our fragile economy would have collapsed. My tiny salary was rather systematically late and I had to constantly argue to get the correct sum. My employer deducted taxes from the salary he paid me, in cash of course, but never declared the taxes to the government. There were no receipts or salary slips from those jobs. We couldn’t afford to protest.
Regardless of all the struggle, in my mind, we were happy. Laughed and loved, a lot. Were sure not only of each other, but of life. That everything would work out, get better.
There’s particularly one thing about that era that I remember vividly. My love had only one pair of shoes and there was a large hole on the sole of the other one. Most inconvenient with the snow and slit of autumn Finland. Although we never tried to eat the shoe, there was something Chaplinesque about it. Romantic even, retrospectively.
We were saving money for a new pair of shoes. It was a priority above everything else as winter was approaching. And he came to the market one especially rainy and grey Tuesday morning – he’d oftentimes drop by before going to work, to give me a kiss.
This time, he’d bought me the most beautiful bouquet of flowers.
Why, I asked, remember the shoes! Because it’s Tuesday, he said.
This was one of the many lessons I learned from my love story. Sometimes they are necessary, no matter what.
Monday kisses. Tuesday flowers.
~*♥*~
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