HAPPY | ✔

DANIEL: 00.0 I'M IN LOVE

🎶FALLING LIKE THE STARS - James Arthur🎶

"And I need you to know that we're fallin' so fast
We're fallin' like the stars, fallin' in love
And I'm not scared to say those words with you, I'm safe."

▪Prologue▪

According to Oxford, love is described as "A very strong feeling of affection linked with sexual attraction." Merriam-Webster goes on about love being some sort of "Strong affection arising out of kinship," or "Attraction based on sexual desire."

Never before had words seemed like such a vast oversimplification. Words, sounds, letters... they just didn't cut it. This was too much, too deep to be described, to be broken down into a phrase or a sentence easily inscribed into parchment.

No, this had to be felt to be understood.

And funnily enough I was no stranger to this feeling. I had fallen in love before, twice.

But never this fast, never this hard.

This was- this was a yearning, a passion that carried the very heat of the sun.

Loving Joyce Marshall was like cracking open your eyelids an inch from the light- painful, yes, yet so fücking brilliant. And though your retinas are toasted to the point of blindness, you keep your eyes peeled open because... well because closing them would mean failure, would mean the loss of a love to shake the very foundation of our understanding of sanity.

Maybe that was it? Maybe in order to comprehend love I needed to reevaluate my perception, shift my very understanding of what it meant to illude madness.

When I was thirteen I fell in love with my sister's bestfriend. Her name was Georgia, and she was my first.

From we were six years old, our summers were spent in Europe. I remember Mom packing us up a hot day in the middle of June and shipping the four of us off in the wee hours of the morning.

My father's parents hated each other about as much as they loved the four of us, so my siblings and I would stay together as far as the airport. There we would split off into two groups: one to Italy to Nonno, and the other to England to Nan. And we'd alternate who got to go where each year.

This system worked perfectly for me 'cause Luke and I were always together, while Caree was always stuck with Isaiah. So she never did find out about me and Georgi. If she had, she'd of surely kicked my äss to Manchester and back.

Nan owned a five bedroom terraced house in London, and Georgia lived just next door. I'd slowly fallen in love with her over the course of three summers. She had been a tiny thing, thin too. Light brown hair cut just above her shoulders, with the biggest eyes you would've ever seen on a girl- not quite blue, but not quite green either- the perfect shade of aquamarine.

She'd been fragile, both in body and in mind. And I think a part of me had liked that. She had made me feel needed in a way I'd never experienced before. Coming from such a large family, it felt great to be singled out. She had chosen to be with, to love, me. At the time, that was enough.

Until I'd returned home early September to discover she'd given me chlamydia as a parting gift.

I can still remember the look of disbelief on my mother's face. Mama had helped Luke laugh me to scorn, while Granma had used the opportunity to mask her horror by rounding us up for a lecture on celibacy. That had put me off sex for half a decade.

I never did see Georgi again, and not because I'd held any personal vendetta against her. Though to be fair, no one could fault me if I had. I had given the girl my virginity, and in turn she'd given me an STD. According to Caree, her family had moved away the following year for Wales. She'd taken the hit hard in light of the fact that it had already been a struggle maintaining her and Georgi's friendship when they only got to see each other for two months every other year. I had let it go with ease, not at all eager to rekindle that old flame.

When we got older, we got to decide for ourselves where we wanted to spend our holidays. And more often times than not, we stuck together. I think by sixteen we had come to realize that life was leading us down separate paths, and it was in our best interests to make the most of the time we had left. Plus, the four of us together was always a riot- more trouble, and by extension, more fun.

Anyway, there had been a few girls throughout college but none had made me weak in the knees. I'd been searching for puppy love, something all consuming, epic. A love to rival the sexy romance novels my sister hid beneath old socks in the bottom drawer. And it wasn't until I had settled in New York at twentyfour did I find it, or rather, her.

Meredith.

Faces like hers were made for the stage, legs like those designed to strut down a catwalk. She was, hands down, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She was the kind of gorgeous that could stop a man in his tracks, whether he be on a sidewalk or in the middle of the highway.

She was catastrophically stunning.

All things considered, it wasn't really a surprise that I'd fallen for that charismatic smile.

A pity, the first time I ever saw her, she was on my brother's arm. And therein laid the real conflict. I had become infatuated with her while she was shacked up with Luke.

Not my finest moment, I'll admit, but alas the truth remains that we do not choose who we fall in love with.

Had I been presented with the choice, I would have given her a wide birth. But the two of us were bound in ways, to this day, I struggle to understand. Like two comets on a collision course, we were destined to meet, to slam into one another in a grand explosion that was sure to bring about disaster.

Meredith was a siren. Like a blundering idiot I'd been lured by her, entraced, dumbstruck. I'd become someone else, a stranger I could not identify everytime I was unfortunate enough to catch sight of my reflection. Like poor sailors of Ancient Greek mythology, I'd become beguiled by her beauty and her intelligence, blindsided by her ambition. But in time, inevitably, I crashed- splintered and wrecked by the cliffs of reality.

I had loved and I had lost, and in the end I counted myself better for it. All my life I had known women. I had known their bodies, even their minds, but never before their souls. And I think that is what set what Joyce and I had apart. She'd become so much more than a conquest in such a short space of time.

Time. Another curious concept to be added to the neverending list.

To those who'd argue the validity of our intimacy on the basis of time, to them I'd say, time is not a measure of love, nor is age a measure of wisdom.

If standing on the brink of death had striven to teach me one thing, it would be not to waste this precious commodity questioning the things I could not change.

Perhaps in the end, love was never meant to be understood, and madness was simply an inevitability.

•••

A HAPPY new year every single one of my incredible readers. May your 2020 be prosperous and magnificent for you and yours.

Thank you for your continued support and overwhelming show of love. I hope you all stick with me on this rollercoaster ride to the finale.

And though this is just the start of part 3, it feels so emotional, especially with this chapter because it felt so much like a journal entry.

Welcome to the beginning of the end. Much love,
-Dree