Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

by Scarlett Drake

I loved him. I was as certain of that as I was my own name, both universal truths. I am Jude Alcott, and I am in love with Caspien Deveraux.

“Don’t all the boys you do that to look at you like this, after?” Maybe it was a pathetic attempt to find out how many boys there were, or maybe it was an attempt to make myself look less...less in love. But his eyes grew very serious as he looked at me. “No,” He said. “No one looks at me the way you do.”

“He’s going to break your heart, you know. And still, you’ll love him. He’ll break it over and over again and you’ll continue to love him.”

That was the thing about heartbreak – mine anyway – it didn’t feel like a complete shattering, like something that could never heal. It felt more like a deep fracture over which, in time, things could grow over. The tear could never be completely mended, not so that it was as it had been, but with enough work and time it could fool the eye into thinking there’d never been a crack there at all.

He’d said nothing of the same heart being broken over and over again, sometimes in exactly the same place, sometimes slightly to the left, sometimes slightly above. That surely would weaken the entire structure until one day, the thing would crumble to dust.

But at the time, that first, deep break had felt like more than just a fracture. It was a great chasm cleaved through the heart of everything I believed; riven so deep and so devastating that I wasn’t sure anything could grow there again.

“The way I have always seen it,” Gideon said as he sipped his wine, “is that we have only two choices when the heart is broken. The first is to allow it to heal. It is quite astounding what the human heart is able to overcome. Though it shall never be quite as strong as it was – its foundations will be forever weakened – it can heal. The second...”

“…is to turn it into so impenetrable a thing, such a fortress, that it will never be breached again.”

“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

If I could have chosen a love, one that would have made me a better version of myself instead of worse, then I’d have chosen Nathan. But we don’t get to choose these things. I’d learned that lesson already, and I’d learn it a few more times still.