I’ve been reading a book called The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender. It’s a lovely book, so well crafted and beautifully written. There was a small part of the book which really resonated with me. It read, “In Gabe’s view, the whole world had given up on love anyway and clung instead to its malformed cousins: lust, narcissism, self-interest.”
How very true. It would only be fair for me to admit that I have become fairly self-interested but I believe it to be in a very healthy way – one of self-awareness, self-acceptance and personal growth rather than in the self-obsessed way that it could have gone.
My thoughts then wandered to Gary and how sex was his only focus in our relationship and how it became a replacement for love and then there was Tom and how he replaced love with narcissism.
But then I realised something quite lovely. I’ve never given up on love. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been hurt, I still believe in love and I still go on searching and hoping that one day it will find me. I could have closed down, hid away, shut out that aspect of life and become someone who focuses on lust or narcissism but instead, I’ve somehow chosen to continue to have faith in love and its existence and to never give up hope that one day it can happen for me too.
