by Ryan O'Reilly
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Seeing the great house at a distance, each window glowed and the building looked like pausing sparks from a sun-colored fire, I regretted my decision not to attend the ball. Weeks before I had decided to avoid Pemberly altogether, my presence bringing to light a certain social blight for the other guests.
At the last occasion it was my face, partially hidden in the security of a darkened corner, which watched Miss Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy behave as though they were the only people in the room. I was left to feel forgotten. The underbelly of unrequited affection.
Love is love, I had always thought; and knows no limitation. You love the person who draws in your affections in a particular way, and the mind cannot help who the body and heart are drawn to. When I felt passion and attraction for someone, it was to their identity and their emotion. The heart can also find a particular kind of affection in two people. In that respect it’s easy to understand how you could love Elizabeth and Darcy.
I don’t know that I loved Darcy and Elizabeth in that way. It’s just that seeing them together – how they seemed surrounded by a tightly woven invisible web – brought back a certain memory. This time I am determined to keep that recollection at bay by watching Pemberly from a safe and dark distance. Watching and remembering, while all inside experience.
“I don’t want to talk,” Jaqueline Morgan had said to me once. “I only want to lay here with you and not talk.”
After a while she turned as though unable to restrain what so obviously existed between us.
“It’s not that I don’t love you,” she said. “It’s you. It’s always been you.”
She seemed to be thinking out loud.
“It’s always been you, but they’ll want me to marry him. They’ll want me to marry someone like him. Brian if you were only one of us in that way. But the good ones never have any money, isn’t that right? It’s because the ones with money are stuck in a tacky world of greed and competition. But you’re not like that are you? You’ll never be like that.”
“Then why did I want to so badly?” I muttered. “If I had money. If I was callous and competitive I wouldn’t feel like this.”
You see I love my friend Jaqueline. I love my friend Dabney. Loved might be a better word, but can you really un-love someone?
If you feel a certain way, do the feeling just disappear if that other person turns out to be a shit? Even after I thought she turned away from love in exchange for security, I still loved her. When he turned away from dangerous and forbidden feelings, I still loved him. I still loved them both after their wedding; after my foolish hope that we always would be young and frozen in time together dissolved like sugar into hot tea.
So like the young fool that I was, once they married on another I left. Left home, left my friend and left my loves. And so like a fool I stay away from them. I stay away from places like Pemberly. I’m not saying I haven’t loved since I left Dab and Jackie. It’s just hard to possibly see the same story playing again with a different type of conductor.
But someday I will go back. Someday I will dance at the ball.
~end
Darcy post created for Pemberley Ball by Ryan O'Reilly
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by Ryan O'Reilly
~-~-~-~-~ guest ~-~-~-~-~
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by Ryan O'Reilly
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