Two nights ago on the phone with the soldier…

“I was talking to La, La, La Lara and I asked her about the Little Match Girl,” I said. “She’s familiar with these stories and I wanted to know what she made of the fact you associated her with me.”

“What did she tell you?”

“She said what it conjured up in her mind was probably different from what you meant. So what did you mean anyway? Why do you associate me with the Little Match Girl?”

“Well I’ll tell you what I think and then you tell me what La La thought.”

“Okay.”

“Well, when I was little I used to go stay with my grandmother from time to time. My white grandmother this is, so this would be my granny. And I liked going over there,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, there were a lot of smells around there. Good smells. You could smell all kinds of stuff around there. Smells of nature this is. It’s not so much that way anymore but it used to be like that and I always liked to go there…”

He went off topic to explain he got to hear civil war stories first hand.

“And then at night I’d go to bed and they had a bedroom where I’d stay and this is where the books were. The books were on this shelf right behind the bed and they had everything, pretty much. All the books you would want were there. They had Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea. They had the Hardy Boys and the Little Match Girl there too.”

“Uh huh?”

“Yeah, so I read it and I don’t know. It had this affect on me. It really affected me.”

“How?”

“Well I liked that Little Match Girl. I liked her a lot but she had this complex destiny.”

“Oh,” I said. “You could say…”

“Yeah, her destiny was a complex one. It was one of a kind. But I liked her but I didn’t like what happened to her.”

“No.”

“Yeah because she died and I’d have liked to been able to save her. I wanted to save the Little Match Girl because it’s my nature to save her but she had this other destiny and she was not to be saved. Her destiny was a hard one and a hard one to understand or reconcile. But mostly what I remember is that there was no way for me to resolve the feelings she created inside of me. She gave me feelings I could not resolve and there was nothing I could do about it.”

“Yep.”

“Yeah, so that book affected me. It gave me complex feelings that I could not resolve and even with time the feelings were not resolvable and this is the same thing that happened when I met you. The exact same thing happened, I had the exact same feelings.”

“Oh,” I said somewhat surprised but quiet.

“Yeah, we met in that little apartment the first time we saw each other. Someone said, this is so and so. And they said this is so and so and so and so and this is Elsa,” he said, stopping suddenly. “And there you were.”

“I remember.”

“Yep, there you were. There you were standing right in front of me and to me you were like the Little Match Girl come to life.”

I exhaled through my nose.

“Yep, because exactly what happened to me when I first encountered the Little Match Girl happened to me again when I saw you. I got these same complex feelings almost from the minute we met there were there. I had them and you had them too.”

“Yeah, I understand.”

“So anyway, that’s it. I have never been able to resolve the feelings the Little Match Girl gave me and I have never been able to resolve my feelings for you either. It’s because you just can’t label these feelings or put them in some kind of neat box. The Little Match Girl and Elsa aren’t going into some kind of neat box so you can just forget about putting them there, it won’t work. They’re too complicated, both of them, so that’s it. That’s what I think you have in common with Little Match Girl.”

“I see.”

“Your destinies are similar,” he added. They are not the same but they’re similar. Both of you have destinies and are complex and they are yours and yours alone. That’s what I think about the two of you, now tell me what La La said about it.”