"too late, two choices, to stay or to leave, mine was so easy to uncover."

I wish that I were strikingly beautiful. The kind that makes people stop and stare. The kind that people say "she doesn't know how beautiful she is" . The kind that didn't leave me saying "This is it then" every morning. I wish I could achieve this without standing in the mirror pulling myself apart.

I have this idea in my head of the woman that I should be. petite, alluring, able to turn heads and challenge a conversation without seeming overbearing. I wish I had the classic "grace" attributed to most of my favorite novel characters, and I hope these are things I can learn myself in the ways of. I feel as though I'm already too old.

I sat down last night, with my favorite novel, and immediately I was lost again. Lost in the pages of a woman who I've seen in my mind since I first read this book at the much too early age of 12. In "Petals on the wind" I find a niche for the voice within my heart. In this protagonist, Catherine Doll, I see so much of myself. She's a woman, who knows that she needs to know how to be a woman in a man's world, but also who claims her fierce independence. She's convicted, to the point of burning herself to prove she can hold her hand on the stove. She's rash and thinks with her heart. She loves everyone she loves more than she can understand. She's got a darkness in her, a side that was broken so young and so small, that it's always there, a chasm of the childhood she didn't have. She has a lover she fights for, a man she can only hold but in instances, a man the world is watching her to see she doesn't love. While other girls talk about the way their heart skips a beat to see/ speak / read Edward Cullen, I have these same fondnesses in my heart, for Dr. Paul Sheffield. It's more unique, because I'm certain I'm the only person who has ever loved him the way that I do, upon just reading the book. Hes got grace, a heart, the kind of mind that never stops working, he has tragedy in his eyes, but lightness in his laughter. It's so silly to love a literary character isn't it ?

I came across an old journal of mine recently, dated 2007. I wrote, in small handwriting late one night "Sometimes I fear that love won't be enough to satisfy me, that I need something greater, deeper. I fear I'm too dark to merely meet a companion and be happy. I need someone who can see the recesses of me,who will love my broken pieces, I don't want the kind of love one just has, I want the kind of love that would DESTROY me to lose."

I must say, my poetic/pathetic analysis of myself shook me. Did I search out an impossible situation without realizing it, so that I could love in my comfort zones and still allow that broken part of who I am to love as well ? The part that doesn't work, did I need something deep and tragic and "once in a lifetime -- but heartache for eternity" so that I could feel like a whole person ?

I don't know. I don't feel like who i am anymore most days. I am lonely, and I tell myself in the mornings, I'm going to go out and find new people. But in my head, I don't want to meet a nice boy and fall appropriately in love.

I say with probably much too much candor, that I found Dr. Paul Sheffield, and as fleeting as it was for my beloved Catherine Doll, my own sense of irrevocable unending love, even for the broken pieces, nails me to my floor most days.
I can't be angry, you can't be upset that you had the most wonderful thing in the entire world, and didn't have it LONG enough. But at the same time, how can I move on from the most amazing thing anyone can feel ?

It's a petals on the wind kind of day, that's for certain.