A Secret Affair

Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being. No one was shallow. Not really.

I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.

Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks. Life itself had become a secret affair.

Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?

When I was nineteen," she said, "I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone.

The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.

The only thing you can neither plan nor control, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, is love itself. When you find it, you must yield to it. But only if it is the one and only true passion of your life. Never if it is anything less than that, or life will consume you. But how am I to know? She had asked him. You will know.

There is no such thing as time. There is only our reaction to the inexorable progress of life.

All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?

If you want something, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, you will never get it. Want is a timid, abject word. It implies that you know you will be left wanting, that you know you do not deserve the object of your desire but can only hope for a miracle. You must expect that object instead, and it will be yours. There is no such thing as a miracle.

Love does not deck the beloved in chains. It just is.