about a boy,
who was lost,
and thought he was found,
until he meets a girl,
the same girl,
who makes him wonder
if there's more to life
than just getting by.
-
[a Jem-centered novella/sequel to The Girl Who Saw Through Jem]
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AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
The world's greatest love stories often pen down tales of wide-eyed boys chasing after prized possessions of untouched maidens. He's the beautiful, headstrong boy with puddles of vermillion against his coarse skin and a passionate eye for romance and he's running, running, running, tearing up the ground and spitting it back out with his worn shoes, skin sweating slightly in pursuit of the amour, the great love. Or more realistically, and quite frankly- sex.
Humans crave a great love story. We really do. We want an explosive love, where girls are dabbing their wrists with lavender or bergamot and boys are dousing themselves in mint or coconut. The boys are desperate to impress with the stereotypical gestures of cheap flowers or satin boxes of chocolate and girls are dreaming of kissing in the rain in whirlwind dresses with boys on motorcycles in Paris. We want the romance they bottle up and sell in movies. We want the stories people write about and poems people lament for. That Romeo and Juliet-esque bonafide passion of feelings.
But real love isn't something that just happens. Love isn't a feeling. Love is a decision. You make a conscious decision when you choose to love, and you make a conscious decision to let someone in and pull you apart.
If all love in this world is based on feelings, the pendulum of when we want to love somebody and when we want to hate somebody will swing so sporadically and so violently the pendulum will fly off its hinges. Why? Because there are some days when you are not in the mood to love somebody. There will be days when all you want to do is hate somebody. And there are days when it's easier to walk out. But love?
Love is the decision to stay.
Love isn't a story, or paradise, or two bodies glowing in the dark, electric with the beat of their souls ricocheting to fluorescent emotion and bedazzling joy. Love isn't a sudden staccato-ed grenade with drunk hands on the back of necks and the preservation of somebody's beauty in your mind.
Because beauty fades, and youth fades, and there will come a time when you're desperate to remember them in the same way you first see them. A girl, hunched over books, hand scuffling through papers. You want them to remember as seventeen or twenty-one. You want to commemorate them as beautiful, wild and young, with laughter phosphorescent against the night sky, and as you stare, something will pound, hard and blunt, in the middle of your chest.
Because before you know it, you cannot visualize a period when they are young neither can you imagine a day when you're rolling in the vitality of your youth. Because one day, they will not be beautiful, but neither will you. And to stay after her pomegranate lips are no longer red, thick and rich as they used to be, and to stay after my visions fails me and my body eludes me, is love.
And sometimes, once in awhile, love is the decision to come back, despite the consequences and everything in your willpower screaming at you not to.
