The Impossible Truths of Love

by Hannah Beckerman

For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

So many times as a child, Nell experienced a feeling of being on the outside looking in, like a little girl at a sweet shop, face pressed to the glass, watching Clare and Laura inside selecting treats from oversized jars, knowing she was not permitted to go in and join them but wondering – hoping – whether there would one day come a time that she was.

It is such a customary feeling, yet no less unnerving for its familiarity. The sense that before she enters her parents’ house, she must shed a version of herself – the adult, professional Nell – in order to inhabit the filial space she occupies here.

Nell’s interactions with her parents have invariably taken place here, at her childhood home, and much as she loves her mum and dad, she cannot shake the feeling, as she heads towards the front door, that she is shrinking herself to childhood size in order to fit through,

She does not want to say that she always drives to Bromley as a means of maintaining some independence, of reminding herself that she is an adult, even as she feels herself regress.

Nell feels something shrivel inside her, like a decaying piece of fruit on a timelapse video.

she had felt like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, pumping water into its wings and preparing to fly.

Does this happen?

now, in place of that juvenescent fear, there is a different awareness: the knowledge that her attendance at the grammar school – and the place at university that followed, the career in academia – have set her apart from her family. However much she loves her parents, those decisions have – just as her dad predicted – set her on a different path, one which has taken her away from them, not just physically but in other, intangible ways too: in the way her family do not truly understand the work she does, the career she is passionate about, the adult she has become. Sometimes, returning home, Nell is overcome by a sense of loneliness: an intense feeling of dislocation that she is at once returning to the heart of her family, to the place she is most loved, and yet also to a place she is not entirely understood.

Ouchie

incontrovertible

New word - unable to be denied/disputed

Denoting a task that can never be completed

intransigent,

Unwilling to change views or agree w something

Grief, she is learning, is love’s echo: it is not possible to have one without the other.

He had recognised that her feelings could not be neatly categorised: that her love and her anger, her confusion and anxiety, her regrets and tentative hopes overlapped in one complex, evershifting Venn diagram.

There is no option to live a life twice. The only decision for her now is how she will respond to the facts she has learnt, to the choices other people made.