Loveless Ages

(Book Trailer to the right)

Preface

            I hate that he is so perfect. I hate that his smile is so charming and that his teeth are so straight and his lips so full. I hate that his arms are so muscular and his hair is so healthy and smooth and luscious. I hate that his eyes are so blue and beautiful and shocking that I can’t seem to think of a proper way to describe them. I hate that his skin is so flawless and his face is so angular. I hate that his demeanor is so warm and his touch is so gentle. I despise the fact that his laugh is like music to my ears. I hate that when I look at him I feel overwhelmed with the most intense emotions. I want to gauge my eyes out every time I find myself sitting beside him, looking at him, and being so mesmerized by what is before me. If I could flip a switch and turn my feelings off, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would do it without giving it a second thought. I would give anything not to feel the way that I feel. I would give anything to be normal. I would give anything to be just like everyone else.

            Sometimes I feel like taking my family journals and tearing them to shreds in frustration. I want to rip them up over and over until each individual piece holds but one letter. I can’t do it though. I have to leave them the way they are and pass them on to my next unlucky descendent. My ancestors wrote the journals. There is this place not too far from where my grandparents and I live, filled with thousands of books of many different genres. It is an old one-story building made of bricks, which is not so common nowadays. Most buildings are made of bulletproof glass walls, rhodium, rhenium, and platinum, but the building I speak of is unlike any other building in all of Schlutonia. It occupies a small plot of land and is made of bricks of various shades of red. There are bright reds, rusty reds and crimson reds and scarlet reds. I love the color red though I don’t know why. Red is bold and vibrant. The doors to this building are tall and made of stone. On the door there is a brass knocker that has seen better days. The knocker has the letters KJM engraved on it. High up on the building, there is a sign that says: “THE KING JAMES MAROSE LIBRARY”. I spend a lot of my time in this building. The building has an abandoned and neglected look to it and this is because only ten people have set foot in it in the last one hundred eighty seven years. This building is my place. I spend a lot more time there than I spend in my own house. The inside is dimly lit and filled with shelves. There is no exposed wall space on the inside. One section is particularly special. It has a small shelf with ten books sitting on it. The books are unlike any other books in the library. They are thick and leather bound and each of them have a name written on them in gold letters. The oldest one has the name Clair Tate written across it and the newest has mine; Malinda Bennet. Each of the nine books before mine are filled from cover to cover with anguish, anger, woe, acceptance, hostility, sadness, passion, intensity and much more. I would get to choose what to fill mine with, and when the time came, I would leave a book in here for my child. And my child would get to choose what to fill hers with. The journals are heartbreaking. A person who has been in love but has never been loved in return writes each one. Girls wrote seven of these books and men wrote two. So what makes my family so miserable? The answer to this question is simple. My family contains the only people in all of Schlutonia who can ever experience romantic love. Each descendent of Clair Tate is destined to go through life falling in love with people who will never love them back. That is how it is, and that is how it always will be. And so I have to accept that Josh, no matter how amazingly perfect and breathtaking he his, will never love me.