Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

by Scarlett Drake

Love in that sense, love in that all-consuming, life-affirming, passionate, glorious sense, had come and gone with one person only, and he’d taken it with him when he left.

People like to talk about all sorts of things that don’t concern them. Most of the horrible stuff people say is just in their own twisted heads.”

“Well, trying is the first part of doing.

Fireworks sparked behind my closed eyes and heat building so quick and urgent that I thought I was about to be incinerated from the inside.

“Love is often painful. I think it’s rather the very nature of it.”

I felt loud and clumsy, as though I was intruding just by existing, so I tried to be as quiet and invisible as possible.

I tried to imagine how I might say it, how I might tell him what was going on inside my mind. But I wasn’t sure what words I would use to explain something I didn’t really understand myself.

“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.”

unable to comprehend having to live knowing your mother hated you, and had killed herself. No wonder he hated the world.

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.

But don’t they say that the things that happen to us in the years when our brains are still developing become part of us forever?

And the terror and hopelessness I felt at having to live like that for the rest of my life, wanting and loving someone who was entirely incapable of wanting and loving me back, was the worst fucking thing imaginable.

“I thought I could live my whole life the way Gideon has: with love being some ancillary but ultimately useless thing I didn’t need. And perhaps I could have.” He turned and smiled, some hollow sad thing I could barely look at. “But then, there was you. And everything that you are: warm and kind, gentle and sweet, and you loved me despite everything I was and everything I did, and everything I couldn’t give you. Christ, I didn’t know what to do with that kind of love, Jude. How to hold it or carry it or even look at it. It was terrifying. I was sure I would kill it – I tried to. But then I began to feel its absence. I missed it. I longed for it. The feel of it on my skin, and deep inside my chest and in my head whenever I felt like I might disappear from loneliness. You and that love was what I clung onto when...when he made me feel as though I was nothing. It was how I survived.”

It’s impossible to let yourself be loved when you’re as inherently un-loveable as I believed myself to be.”