hills like white elephants by ernest hemingway

i love the title. it sounds so wonderfully dreamy. i like the story, too. it was a special vignette of the characters' lives, but they hardly noticed that. it was their time to make decision that would have great bearing over their future. go forward or backward? i wonder why they wouldn't say what they really wanted. did they love each other that much? did they love their lives that much? maybe they did, and probably they thought a reckless utterance, or in their case blatant refusal to comply with the other's wishes, would have jeopardized the perfect lives they had. just going from one hotel to another. just seeing the world and delving into the pleasures it offered. why leave that? or rather, why leave that for a baby? a baby that is just like a white elephant, very, very precious but nevertheless cumbersome. i am sort of assuming that the title is related to that.

i think the girl was pregnant. she was the typical girl from the long gone era of hemingway. she was submissive and pleasant and just plain dreamy. but she was still a girl, a potential mother, and probably she felt the heart of her baby beating against her very insides. it pained her, in some ways, but not with too much intensity.

"Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe" :((

apparently, the girl was in a wistful mood, too. i wonder how long she had waited for it. i think she really wanted it. she was hesitant to undergo abortion, alright, but nonetheless not passionate. maybe because the baby was not still a baby, but a mere embryonic entity which still seemed so very far away, both from the girl and the world. what was there was the beautiful world and the opportunities to travel. and the man, yes the man. in the end, they went forward, surging on to barcelona. quite sad, really.

why weren't those two prepared for such incident? really, sometimes the present gets to us, and often it makes us forgetful of the future which we must eventually tread. :(