I blogged a bit ago about writing a chapter in Requiem where Vasily finds himself interviewing a boyfriend from twenty years prior; it wasn’t an easy chapter to write, given the emotions that were bubbling up for my character. In fact, I think it took the better part of a week to get to the final cut, one that I felt was true to the visceral nature of the experience while also moving the plot forward
As I often do, I had to circle back to that moment for a later scene in the book, and wound up re-reading it again in it’s in entirely. While we don’t get to see the actual breakup that happens between Vasily and his first love, seeing the ache on both sides of that equation had me catching my breath — and remembering a few of my own early missteps in that area. Sean has a line in Bewitched that sort of paints in how that feels:
Emotions always ran higher for teenagers, and I was no exception to that rule; that I had the ability to work them out in the pool had been something of a godsend, but not a complete salve, either. It wasn’t hard for me to recall that fateful day in the halls of Windeport Regional High when I first discovered how fickle teenage love could be — or, perhaps more importantly, how love could blind one to more important truths lurking just beneath the surface.
Bewitched (Chris Jansmann)
I’ve always been fascinated with how each of us views our past — and how, when we’re in the moment, we often don’t understand the true importance of what is happening to us. I’m sure I wasn’t the only teenager who thought my life had ended when my one true love told me there was someone else; finding out there could be more than one person fitting that description always felt like an epiphany, one I could only truly appreciate when my actual soulmate came into my life many years later.
Working through the past lives of Sean and Vasily has helped me to further understand how these key moments in our lives can start off as a single stone tossed into the smooth surface of a pond, and how the ripples that are generated from that single act have ever expanding ramifications for the kind of people we become. Science often refers to this as the butterfly effect, the notion that a small change at one end of a system can cause large effects at the other end; while it generally is applied as a theory to things like the weather (or, in science fiction, the inherit risks of time travel), I’ve found it to be a tidy formula when thinking about human relationships — certainly one of the most complicated systems out there.
So, breakups can be bad — horrific, even — but the sort of person we become after them is informed by how we get through them. Do we mope? Do we drag ourselves through the pain, forging something entirely new out of the crucible we’ve been thrust into? Or, as happens every now and then, do you get a magical second chance to pluck a Happily Ever After from the ashes?
Any of those options are valid — humans are a richly diverse lot, and react accordingly… which makes them incredibly interesting to write about…