Trials and Consequences of Love

Final Author's Note and Thank You.

The Banana Boat Song, simply for the culture.

***

Dear beautiful readers,

It is Carson's influence that is allowing me to pen this letter to you; he and I have two things in common: the need to explain ourselves and the need to not speak but write said explanations.

The first and most important thing I wish to say is thank you; if you're here, reading this then I am automatically in love with you and I am willing to support all your ventures. A lot of persons read the first author's note and the first chapter and then they leave so the fact that you read all 31 parts and you're still here reading this means the world to me.

This journey has been a lot of fun for me; I know I keep mentioning it but I am not -in any sense- a prose writer. Ever since I've known myself I have gravitated towards I believed that prose is speaking from the mind whilst poetry is a sneak peak into the soul. But over the few months that I took to write TACOL I realized that prose writing could be just as soulful as poetry.

I am generally an unaffectionate person -I literally cannot say the words 'I love you' without feeling uncomfortable- so the hardest part about writing this was having to write the different declarations of love. I don't even know how I managed to write an entire book about love.

I do not know what you guys got from the story but I wrote it with the intention of showing how love is different for everyone and how love can make you do questionable things. It was never my intention to have the story be about just Alexandre, Aurora, Carson, Emily and Valentina-Rosa; I wanted to involve all of them, each friend had a story about love to tell and though not in as much detail as I had hoped I think they all told their stories and told them well.

I just want to say that I have never experienced anything that I wrote about -I mean besides basic emotional manipulation and gaslighting-. Most of what I wrote literally just came to me, then I wrote a few parts from second hand experience and the rest I had to do research to ensure it was accurate.

I want to dedicate this story to victims of any and every type of abuse there is; victims are strong and I think a lot of people neglect to acknowledge that it is no easy task being robbed of yourself and still having to live everyday and pretend that everything is okay.

This book was an act of redemption, it was not even supposed to be more than 3000 words and it sure as hell shouldn't have been posted here but the more I wrote the more I felt that the story needed to be heard.

In the very first quarantine/lock down I found a body of work that I had written when I was about 11/12 and I wrote it I was so embarrassed like I will literally never ever allow anybody to read that. I mean for someone that was 11/12 years old it was really good but having read that again for the first time at the age of 18 I could not believe that I wrote it, I never cringed that much in my life. So I was determined to write something to redeem myself, I had wanted a short story but everything I wrote I couldn't finish because it just didn't feel right. So I prayed about it -I am not religious but I am very spiritual and I involve God in everything- when I prayed, I got this story. I don't care how cliche this sounds but I think for some reason I got this story from Him to share with victims of abuse. It's as if it's a way of saying "it's okay not to be okay and I see you and I know what you're going through and somebody everything will be okay just trust time no matter how hard it gets".

There were so many reasons I wanted to keep this story to myself; for starters, I thought it was horrible and then there was a point where I had mistakenly written "trails" instead of "trials" and someone (not a friend but a business person) pointed it out to me and I was literally so embarrassed I wanted to delete the whole thing but in the end I just corrected it and moved on. I still think that this story isn't all that but the fact that you are here reading this, must mean that I did something right.

I wanted to capture as much emotion as I could and I wanted to play on my readers' emotions. I wanted to show love and all the trials and consequences associated with it. And I say love I mean every find of love from parental to friendship to romantic. I wanted an emotional rollercoaster and I hope I came close to achieving that goal.

I know this story has loop holes and they were all deliberate I swear; I wanted to make sure that if I ever got bored again then I could write a story for each set of characters (because I personally think they deserve their own stories) but I covered enough ground to have all the important questions answered.

There is one thing that for some reason I feel obligated to mention; I made all the characters rich because I did not want this to be a story where money played an important role in relationships. And sure I could've made them all poor but nah. I just wanted the scales to be balanced so that the love between characters could be as genuine as possible.

Again, if you are reading this it means the world to me and I literally love you so much.

I hope that one day, someone will be reading this in a post Covid era but until then, stay safe and be kind to yourself.

P.S. I want to say a huge thank you to my mom and my friends (Stacia, Lori, Damaine and Keroy) for motivating me throughout this entire process and a huge thank you to onlyshannon  for inspiring me.

If it's not too much to ask can you please give me an honest review of the story (I think I need it).

That's it now, until next time.

Stay beautiful.

With all my love,
Tiona❤️🦋.

Put your end dates here please❤️

I swear I'll come back and edit this one day.