Love and I

Here is an extract from my other book 'Love & I'

The two are having a phone conversation:

“Does he even have a chance?” Maida said “Despite all he did, does he stand a chance?”

Sara looked sternly at some point on the floor. It might have seemed the point was randomly selected, but her face suggested the point was consciously chosen, because the secret was in that single point that may look like nothing out of the ordinary to others. Then she said “Imagine you are standing on top of a very high cliff. You look down and the sea underneath is clear blue, calling you to dive in. But you’re afraid. You’re afraid you’ll hit the rocks on the way. You’re afraid the water isn’t deep enough. You’re afraid of what might be in the water if it is deep enough. And most of all, you’re afraid of all three; that you’ll hit the rocks, find the water too shallow to understand, yet deep enough to hide a soul-stealing shark. Then someone appears next to you nudging you on to take the dive. You tell him your fears and he says ‘No, the water is deep. No, there are no sharks there anymore. Don’t worry about the rocks, I have cushioned them for you.’ You don’t believe it. You have doubts; I mean, who would cushion a cliff just to make you feel safe enough to dive into those blue waters, so that you can experience the thrill of the dive, the coolness of the sea, so that you find out what hides underneath. But he persists. He’s good at that. So, eventually, against your better judgement, you take the leap. You take the leap of faith like you never thought you would. You miss the rocks, so it doesn’t matter whether they’re cushioned or not. You’re not sure if you’ve touched the bottom, the bed of the sea, so you don’t know how deep it really is. And just when you get comfortable in the water, relaxing, breathing for the first time with your whole body, there’s a sharp sting. A pain like no other you’ve ever had in your life. It erases all that was good about the dive. It takes the breath away. It shows you, you were right to be afraid. Do you understand?”

“I’m with you so far.” Maida said, thinking back to all that Demir did since then.

“All you want to do is get out of the water. You want to go back to the cliff and admire the sea from that safe distance. You want to delete it all. But you can’t. Three pearls of that sea found their way into your heart and you’d die before you let them go. Yet the pearls can’t live without their sea. So you stay on the shore. From there, you can walk into the waters, always safe in the knowledge that you can get out. Safe in the knowledge that you’ll never go deep enough to run into the shark again. And then, just like that, you find that for all those years that you thought you were on the shore, safe, you weren’t. It was an illusion. In reality, you were on a little boat, somewhere far off the shore, just waiting for the boat to give way to the water so that you are right back in the sea. I’m back in that sea. Unprepared. Uninformed. I’m looking out for the shark.”

Maida sighed “Right.” She said quietly “If all he’s done hasn’t made you trust him, you never will.”

“There’s nothing he can do that will make me trust him again. He said it all before. He gave me his word that there’s nothing dangerous in the sea. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have dived in. He’s already shown that they can be apart, but then they can get back together regardless of me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I’m the idiot.”

“Yeah.” Maida said “You know I don’t support adultery and more than you do. But, for a moment or two, I thought, perhaps, because of all he did all these years, and because I thought you, maybe, still love him, you might reconsider. I get it now. What’s love, even if it is there, without trust?”

“Exactly. Even with yourself. The moment you stop trusting yourself, is the moment you love yourself a little less. We only love the things we trust will not hurt us. For all other things… at best, we admire them from a safe distance. Love isn’t every emotion that draws us to another being or thing; there are lesser emotions that can accomplish that… But only the wisest of us know what love really is when we feel it; and it is as powerful in pleasure as it is in pain. Perhaps there are people out there longing for the pain, but I love myself too much to want to cause me harm; if I didn’t, I would have stayed in the war, and Demir and I wouldn’t have met.”

“Hmm… So life gives you pain no matter what you do?”

“Life gives you love, it is up to you to choose how to use it. Fate gives you… Oh, don’t get me started on fate. She has messed it up big time.”

Maida smiled to herself and then said “Try get some rest. Leila and I will see you and the girls in the morning.”

Back in the empty waiting room Sara looked out of the large window at the dark sky and twig-like moon disappearing gently as the sunlight shifts out of its reach. Flashbacks of the day she met Demir started; the rain, the taxi, Istanbul and the crowded street, it was all right there in the darkness. She could have turned him down. Fate threw a ball and if she didn’t catch it, it would have vanished. But she did catch it and it illuminated a whole new world, a new life. What would her life be if it wasn’t for that? Would she have found a better man and had the girls with him? Would she now long for her husband to embrace her and make her feel safe, rather than… - for the rest, read the book!