Every morning I wake up and try to write a few more words for my novel’s hero. A man who’s story, when met with mine, did not end well, but  I am burdened with the hope of writing a happy ending if I cannot live one. The man who, for me, will never age, nor fade, nor die. The man I could’ve spent an eternity with if I had not been fortune’s fool. If Life had presented him to me a little later, or perhaps much earlier. If I hadn’t already made promises and been born into something that shouldn’t be shared.

Strength and virtue are things I aspire for, but sadly lacked for most of my life. A constant dreamer I lived in make believe worlds of poetry and prose as written by Austen, Hemingway and Shakespeare, but did not have the might to make them real. I shouldn’t even write “lived” as I still would spend my life asleep if it meant dreaming of Love in the way that the best classics tell them–the passion that no longer exists nor that I’ve earned.

I never thought I’d be a woman obsessed with Love, yet here I am wanting, needing, desiring something I know nothing about. I’ve only read the words, and cannot seem to come up with any for my novel’s hero and his disaster of a lover. My fingers are numb from typing, my life lacks the experience I need to articulate that which I long for. Whether it be words or truth, my heart aches for something deeper than anyone can give in this day in age–and being such a foreign concept to me, I cannot be sure I’d recognize it once it laid before me. I may have already missed my chance, but I haven’t the resilience to try to find the answers to all my questions.

A green scroll hangs on my bedroom wall with words written on it that at times feel true and at others feel forced…settled even. How would I know the truth from fiction here if I cannot speak to it’s author? He wrote of showers and candles and strawberries, of family and love, but there are no traces of me in his words–I could  hand it to my sister and she would just as easily think it was meant for her. In this reality I find the basis for my fiction, never knowing if his affection was real and being damned to write him as my Great Love.