TE16 Turkish Delight

Our Best Love Story

11 The Earthquake Inside

As it was, must he now undertake a new complicity, despite all his resentments, with an author who seemed capable of dreaming up new stories based on certain bodies of text or dubious cues, making all the arrangements necessary for such preparations, consciously ignoring the parts he didn’t see fit to include and striving to tell any lie necessary to ensure the persuasiveness of events, or set out on another road afresh, toward another person, another hell or author? A ripe search for an unexpected story, untested possibilities, he thought elatedly, remembering, all of a sudden, the same old stories, the images, and the regrets. Yet he’ d attempted this adventure, these emotions and sentiments before. That was partly the reason for the blizzard of anxiety and unavoidable and inevitable questions that overtook him. Could one be sure, for instance, where a relationship, a love adventure, and, increasingly, a story would begin and end? Could a lover not keep going, in spite of all the years and changing seasons and yearnings alike, within another, silently if need be? Most importantly, would these departures and obligatory reunions ever be spent, our journey to our brokenness or to our choices ever end?

31