Beth
Beth
Fourteen years after
AFTER THE FIRE
BETH
What’s for you won’t go by you.
That’s what I used to believe. It’s basic, reassuring. But also, the opportunity to shirk any responsibility for yourself. To push your life into fate’s hands.
Let me tell you a story.
It’s a story of girl meets boy. But not your usual one.
It’s a story of girl meets boy. And then everything went wrong.
Her very own play. It has taken her the best part of a year to write and produce. The most intense, exhausting, exhilarating year of her life.
She reads over the opening page for what feels like the thousandth time, trying to view it through another person’s eyes. She swallows. Tries to imagine Nick’s reaction when he hears it.
If he hears it.
It’s been a year since that night in the park, and things still aren’t right between them.
Of course, he called her after and apologised and once she’d got over the humiliation, she managed to convince him – to convince herself – that it was all fine. Water under the bridge.
After all, the alternative – cutting him out of her life forever – was unbearable.
But afterwards, she threw herself into writing the play. And she avoided him as much as possible. It still hurt so much that he loved her but wasn’t willing to give their relationship a try.
She doesn’t care if Nick never comes to see the play. Whatever happens with him, writing about their situation has helped her.
Because surely there are other people who feel they should be with a particular person but, for one reason or another, aren’t? Surely there are other people out there who can relate, in some way, to her situation?
It’s taken her so long to process it all. But writing it down has helped more than all the therapy, soul-searching and hiding away she’s done before. Unpicking her feelings and trying to find some clarity among the tangled mess of guilt, shame, bad timing, bad luck and miscommunication.
The way she feels about her own writing completely depends on how she’s feeling that day. If she’s feeling relatively happy, she sees the promise in her work, the good bits.
But if her self-esteem is suffering, then she feels the whole thing is terrible.
She is not an objective critic.
It’s taken all these years but she’s finally come to terms with it. They will never be together. Some issues are insurmountable.
She has finally accepted that there’s no such thing as one true love, one great love story that defines your life. That life is more complicated, more nuanced than that, and sometimes you have to settle for the next best thing.
She realises now: that you can actually love someone with everything you have, and yet still not be right for each other, and she’s grown to accept it. There is no happy ever after.
A hard truth, but one worth learning: some things are bigger than love.