She had a bitter taste in her mouth after kissing him, it resembled regret and she resolved to swallow it every day. Love is a fantasy that must be replaced by cold learning to give and take, to accept and mould oneself to put up with the regrets of the loss of those fantasies; and to bear the unpleasantness of the defects of the beloved. It is an everyday grind that insists on lodging itself in your heart so that without it you cannot feel at all whole again.
It is this that she swallowed, knowing the fruit to be had was that she could pretend more convincingly than before that she was not alone, that she had someone. She forgot that to truly flourish she needed to hold onto someone or something that would hold on to her, not just hope and imagine it to be so, to let go of the idea that to care and be cared for was anything other than a selfish, if not necessary, act.
Love too was for oneself, sating some primal yearning, filling some gap, making one complete; and that deception of love’s reciprocation is more likely mutual and consequently less foolish than being taken for a ride as a desperate naïve. Though all that happens too, she had for now forgotten it and had decided to learn to love the bitter taste, that to have someone was the answer to her dreams, even if he was not quite the figure she had conjured across her plain flat life.
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