It's a quiet Sunday morning. I woke up early, for once, and it felt good in a way because it reminded me of how I used to wake up at dawn to write. Dawn was always the clearest time of day for my mind.
I like taking pictures of landscapes, capturing the play of light and the beauty of simple things. Like a tree with twisted limbs, or the shimmering surface of water in the sun. I think I'm definitely going to invest in a decent camera as soon as I can.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Love was always just about two people caring so deeply about each other that the mere thought of being apart is unbearable. The intense desire to share everything, even in all the differences, and the comfort of knowing it's okay to be yourself truly with that one other person. I never had the chance to experience that for myself... but I wish I could.
I just finished watching a lovely romantic movie called The Time Traveller's Wife and though I didn't cry at the end I almost sort of did. The plot itself wasn't great, but I was absorbing the emotions and feelings between the two protagonists.
The guy keeps traveling in time at complete random moments, making it impossible for him to lead a normal life with the woman he loves. In fact, he meets her when she's just a young child and he carries on coming back throughout her life as she grows older. She falls in love with him instantly, it seems, and spends most of her time waiting for him to reappear in her life. Right before they manage to get married, he has a conversation with her father, who comments about the fact that really, as parents they never quite succeeded in making her deal with reality. That's perhaps what made their love so strong in the end... He was suffering from a 'condition' that made him a ghost in this world, and she was an artistic dreamer who saw him in a way nobody else could.
Anyway... In a story I wrote, which is more of an excuse to expose my deepest thoughts under the guise of writing a fantasy, the heroine's journey begins as a child. As a child, she is the explorer, full of imagination and dreams... Like me, she longs to escape into another world, one made of pure beauty and magic - everything her reality isn't.
The power of a writer rests on the ability to change the odds in any way we like. In my reality, I never escaped anywhere but more pain and disappointment, but I had the power to give my heroine everything I could never get myself. I gave her a portal through which to escape - with a twist, of course. She was never going to escape without having to learn things in the process... Things about her true self, about life and what it means in reality even within a dream, about duty, courage and Meaning. I also gave her Love.
At the end of the story, she is left with a clear choice: remain in that other world, or return home.
Now that the bad guys are defeated (of course I was going to make the bad guys lose in this story... mainly because they always win in my reality) she is free to choose, but then again by then we all know she was always free to choose from the start - but she could not understand that for a long while, because often in life, we make choices that simply don't feel like true choices... even though they are. So what does she end up doing? On the one hand, her family is waiting for her back home, on the other, she fell in love with a boy from that other world. In other words, she finds herself with one foot in each world, and that's what makes the decision one of the most difficult to make.
I, who live with one foot in reality, and the other in the realm of dreams, could never bring myself to remove one foot or the other completely... So even as the writer of the story, I could never quite decide on what my heroine would choose to do... and so in the end I decided to leave it for the reader to decide. The story ends with the rising of dawn, and the reader's imagination free to envision what happens next.
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