Fictionlet
Greg tapped his fingers together nervously. “Well, what do you think?”
“Well, the prose is lovely as usual, of course,” Brigid said. “I particularly like your use of the phrase ‘flying leap through a rolling donut.’ But … well…”
“You hate it.”
“No, I don’t hate it, but it’s not convincing.”
“Eh? What do you mean?”
Brigid took a deep breath, bracing herself, and said, “Life isn’t like what you’ve written here. You write about falling in love with the misty squooshiness of somebody who’s never actually done it. With all these protestations of ‘you make me whole’ and ‘the world is an empty bubble without you’ and so forth. I mean, yes, people really do say that stuff, but usually that’s because they don’t really know what they’re talking about.”
“Well, that’s better than a guy spotting some chick in a bar, he goes up to her and says, ‘How about it, sugar-bumps?’ and they pop off to a motel-by-the-hour, isn’t it? I like to think of an attempt at romance as being quite refreshing.”
“Oh yes, it’s very charming,” Brigid agreed. “But like I said, not convincing. You can’t really know what love is like until you’ve really experienced it — both the good and bad of it. Love isn’t just joy, it’s also despair. When you’re flying that high, it’s a nasty shock when you come crashing back down to the ground.”
He blinked. “Well…” he said, trying to figure out some kind of response.
“If you want your hero to really be happy, he’s got to take on a more pragmatic view of love … one where it’s more like icing on the cake. He needs to be happy to have it, but content to live without it. Until then, what you’ve got is codependency. This stuff you’ve written, is pretty fantasy, but not a proper way to live. When you get right down to it, it’s rubbish! You write like you’ve got the heart of a teenage girl.”
“Hmph,” Greg said. “Better than having the heart of a rattlesnake.”
“Hiss, hiss, baby.”
-The Gneech
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