Up the Downside

In the thick of French separatist revolutionaries aimed at blowing her Quebec off Canada, seventeen, I was the not-so-good girl anymore from an embattled family in live-for-today, Beatles infested 1967. What a time to bump into a die-hard American from New York with a passion to be a doctor. But without the stuff in grades to get him into med school. Enter 1969 lonely and distrustful of love and marriage, I said, Yes to Harry, who brought us to Belgium. Neverland, in my mind where I waited for the other shoe to drop in a whiff of my bubby's steaming cabbages. Grey and drizzly, inhabited by stony-faced people wrapped in trench coats with a look of zombies. Where you're accepted seemed to mean nothing against finding a place to live with heat. A job. And once-a-year exams in Flemish boiled down to pass or fail on the other side of that war in Vietnam, waiting for more Americans. So much to overthink, time ticking with no job. No room for me but by Harry's side, a tacked on smile, so good at pretending I'm okay when I'm not, being practical as always, on the way to his dream, up the downside unawares toward who I am.