The Choice Between Love and Loneliness
Love. We seek it despite knowing it's going to hurt us, perhaps even break us. Yet we are willing to face the pain it will bring because the alternative for most, is worse.
To go to bed alone, to wake up alone, to eat alone, to watch a film alone. To shop alone. To travel alone. To watch a pair of cranes fly across the sky, alone. To drink. Alone.
I am alone. So far, this is my choice. But it is not easy. I was left by my husband almost a year ago and divorced by him just over six months ago. It still hurts, even though he was cruel to me at the end of our marriage, and left me for (at the very least, the hopes of being with) another woman he had been pursuing for some time. At times I still want him to come back. At others, I shudder at the thought and am grateful to be free of him.
Is it ironic I write of love, think of love, plan stories of love when I myself am essentially unloved and unwanted?
They say to write what you know. What does this author know? Does she know of the love she writes? Yes and no. Long ago, in her London days, one in particular gave a glimpse into the depth of the love her characters have explored, which still dwells in the hidden corridors of her heart. She immortalised him as Ahmen, although only in appearance, the rest is fiction, although perhaps not the tumultuous, passionate, broken love Ahmen possesses for Meresamun.
But the truth is E A Carter is waiting. Waiting for the one who will take her to the places her characters have been, to experience the purest of love, where loyalty and sacrifice are cemented into an unbreakable bond of eternal love.
Yet what does she find when she explores the reality she now finds herself in after more than a decade of being in a relationship? A cold, digital, disposable world where the beauty of love is plundered and violated via video calls and shallow words of pleasure shared with one partner after another in a virtual replay of Logan's Run.
A world where hedonism rules and love languishes. A world where lies are common currency and honesty is kicked into the gutter to die. She realises perhaps the love she writes about, believes in, lives for, is as possible to achieve in this loveless, selfish world as getting hit by an asteroid.
And yet. What else can be done? Somewhere out there in the desolate, barren digitalscape in which we are immersed there must be at least one kind, loyal, decent, honest, honorable man left who won't bow to the rape of love. A Sethi. A real man somehow still existing between the cracks of this soulless hell we have created.
If not, she will continue to wait. To dream. To believe.
And to write of love.
Alone.