Intermission - about Daisy
It’s a truth impossible to avoid, and one so easy to deny during the happier moments, but, eventually, the things that once brought us joy will bring only a kind of nostalgic pain, and the things that once provided escape inevitably become the very things we seek escape from.
Sunday morning had the good grace to shine a pleasant sun on Daisy as she reclined on her porch. Her place, in the slowly unravelling wicker lounge, would likely be occupied most of the morning.
Sense and Sensibility lay face down in her lap. It was part of a set, Jane Austen’s popular books in hard cover. They were all of them read many times over- nearly every adolescent is forced to read Pride and Prejudice in school, and write essay after essay on every inch of the narrative, and for most people that experience is traumatising enough to convince them that no book by poor Jane is worth reading ever again. For Daisy, it was the only thing in the syllabus she enjoyed. Even now, she kept a pen lodged between the cushions in case she felt like scribbling something in the margins.
She closed her eyes to soak in the warmth.
At one time, Daisy had known love. Or at least, she had thought so.
Oliver Randall was her best friend and confidant since before Daisy had properly learned to read and write. When she was ten, she wrote him a note during class to confess her secret admiration, but forgot to include his name, and it was accidentally passed on to Tommy King instead. When she was fourteen, she mustered up the courage to explain her feelings while they were studying together in the library, but someone pulled the fire alarm before she could get the words out. Two years after that, Oliver started seeing a girl named Patricia Woods. Daisy had convinced herself that it was a passing fling, and nothing to be concerned about, but when he told her that he wanted to take stupid Pat to some school dance, Daisy could take it no longer. A romantic at heart, and with all her faith put into Jane Austen's happily ever afters, she blurted that she loved him, and that she couldn’t stand to see him with stupid Patricia. Didn’t he know? Theirs was supposed to be an epic love story. It was written in the stars! They were brought together by forces beyond their control! What other outcome could there be?
Apparently, there was another outcome. Oliver was extremely off-put by Daisy’s declaration and not at all interested in her romantically. They didn’t speak much after that.
However, Tommy King had held onto the note he had been mistakenly passed in fifth grade, and had loved sweet Daisy from a distance ever since. At the Spring Ball, he asked her to dance. Three years later, he asked her to marry him.
And on a beautiful spring day, much like this one, Daisy arrived at the end of the aisle, bouquet in hand- only to find that Tommy was not waiting at the other end. One of the groomsmen awkwardly handed her a handwritten note that, for all it’s poetic wording, essentially said that Tommy had realised this was not the life for him, that there was still so much he wanted to do, and that he was going to backpack across the European countryside to ‘find himself’.
In reflection, Daisy questioned whether she had really known love at all. Can you truly love a person if they don't reciprocate? We still call it love, but something will always be missing. And so, if you yearn for a person that does not want you, the adoration and pining will only yield pain.
Daisy shook her head at the morbid train of thought. It was too beautiful a day to be dwelling on what had long gone. She had nearly forgotten about the sunshine, the breeze, and the waves of rolling hills.
Before dismissing the thought completely, though, she picked the pen sticking out of the chair and wrote, very small, in the space below Page 36:
I’ve reached out quite far enough.
A life devoted to a Love unaccomplished
And, as such, it cannot be called by that name any longer;
Only once, in the throes of possibility, and while hope lived.
But I’ve crossed the threshold,
So now, in the after-time,
And in every moment after the realisation
That it has transformed -
We shall call it Loss instead.
