Night at the Library

She sprang to life as everything I wasn't in seventh grade: slender, vivacious, with delicate features, warm brown eyes, and abundant auburn curls. Gracefully drifting through aristocratic circles in nineteenth-century Austria, my fictional heroine wore lovely gowns, danced to Strauss waltzes, and won the heart of a handsome hero when they met on a dark and stormy night.

He had a thing for brunettes.

My first attempt at writing a novel was shamelessly melodramatic, but I'd just read Gone With the Wind in furtive solitude (mostly when my mom thought I was cleaning my room). I was hooked on historical fiction, which fueled my interest in writing and shaped some of my early notions about romantic love.

During high school, I fell for a couple of boys but realized that I was no beau-catching Scarlett O'Hara. Quite the opposite, as Elizabeth Bennett once said. Instead of filling the role of wallflower at weekend dances, I made a conscious decision to focus on reading and writing.

The idyllic heroine stayed with me, finally "consenting" to climb down from her pedestal and get real. She evolved into a girl with emotional baggage who learned to love and trust over a long period of time. The premise of my masterpiece was hardly original and some scenes still oozed cheese, but I scribbled nearly three hundred pages before young adulthood changed my perspective again.

Two weeks after high school graduation, I left home to get a head start on college. The unfinished tale stayed behind in a series of spiral notebooks that I hid in a bedroom drawer.

A mostly studious English major, I tried to dissect sonnets and delve for deep interpretations of literary prose. Romance was relegated to the rare novel that I read over lunch when I needed a break from T.S. Eliot or John Donne (as in deceased poets, not prospective dates).

Just before spring break in 1984, I was studying for finals at the campus library. I'd noticed a tall dark stranger among the fourth floor regulars but when he stopped at my table that night, something clicked. We ended up discussing art history, our families, and milking cows until a pregnant lady from the front desk trekked upstairs to inform us that it was closing time.

Maybe I hadn't driven my car that night because it was low on gas. More likely, I'd left its headlights on and the battery had died. At any rate, the hour was late and March evenings still chilly. When this young man realized that I was shivering/bereft of transportation, he offered his jacket and joined me on the long walk to my apartment.

I could take the easy route and say that the rest of our story is ordinary, middle-class, peanut-butter-and-jam history. It's certainly not the stuff of a bestseller, destined for the big screen. But, unlike a formulaic romance, real-life narratives aren't peopled with Barbie-and-Ken characters who jump through predestined hoops to happy endings that hardly begin to explore the complexities of love.

(I'm not looking down my nose at those who decompress by reading fantasy or "literature lite". The Sound and the Fury when you're raising toddlers or teenagers? Ha.)

Sometimes my husband and I happen to be out walking when the spring sunset mellows to a pastel glow. I remember how it brightened new cottonwood leaves as we strolled across campus twenty-eight years ago. But I don't color that season with shades of nostalgic bliss. Astounding as it was to realize that someone loved me unconditionally, I shared some emotional baggage with my fictional heroine. It spilled into happy moments and deep-set fears, hindering my ability to reciprocate. To trust.

When we married, I was ready to embrace the peace I had felt after he proposed a full year before. It was a leap of faith made with incredible naivete and joy. Like most young couples, we couldn't feel the aching fatigue of prolonged responsibility. We didn't foresee challenges that stripped remaining pretense like lightning on living wood, exposing inner layers. Leaving us vulnerable. Raw.

At the same time, we couldn't fully comprehend the power of committing to promises made before God, family, and friends. Granted, there are times when it is necessary to leave an abusive or unfaithful spouse. But through conflicts, mistakes, and inevitable growing pains, neither of us is going anywhere. The intensity of early attraction was beautiful and valid. So is honest acceptance of a well-known human being in this complex, often frenetic phase of middle-aged love.

In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, "When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity, when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity--in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern."

My fictional heroine still exists in spiral notebooks that now sit on an open shelf as reminders of how it felt to write with joyful abandon. If I ever revisit her story, it won't include duels and abductions. But there is a place for romance in the real world.

copyright March 30, 2012 by Nani Lii S. Furse