luv hurtz

Harry left on Friday and took a little piece of my heart with him back to Bavaria. On Thursday night, after spending forty-five minutes slowly penning eight postcards, he pulled me aside and said, I have a gift for you. He reached into his backpack and brought out an oversized yellow t-shirt with a picture of a flaming winged heart shot through with arrows and a banner that read: LUV HURTZ. The message was the right one, he said, and also the English was appropriate for his level of understanding.

This was his gallows humor. The night before, I told him that we had problems in part due to our inability to speak the same language at the same level of fluency. We had a long and apocalyptic talk, during which I told him that not even love could conquer genuine problems of compatibility (nationality, sociability, communicative ability, ambition), at the end of which he said, "You have ruined my life."

Then he repeated this in German: "Du hast mein Leben ruiniert." He seemed to find this amusing, and said, "Wir haben unser Leben ruiniert." ("We have ruined our lives.") He paused, and said, "Actually, this is a very good phrase for learning German grammar. 'Wir werden unser Leben ruinieren haben.' This is very complicated, future . . . maybe future perfect tense." ("We will have ruined our lives.") And then he conjugated the future perfect form of this sentence for all of the different pronouns. ("Ich werde, du wirst, er/sie/es wird, usw.")

And that is all. Harry is gone. I can't really continue renewing my heartaching feelings for someone so impossibly distant. So that is that. Wir werden unser Leben ruinieren haben. Luv hurtz.