Daily Writing Challenge - Quote

            So often now books are made into movies, events and characters once given life with personal imagination reinvented into moving pictures. The faces we created in our minds are changed. The feelings evoked are given voice.

Today's writing challenge is based upon emotion. 

Choose a quote from a recent movie and speak of what it means to you. Be vague, be specific. Do as you wish. But give a label to those unnamed feelings, the ones you keep hidden. Tell the world or keep it to yourself, use it to purge yourself of dark memories, of regrets, of the sadness in your soul.

The following is from the recent installment of The Hobbit movie trilogy, a dialogue between Thranduil and Tauriel as she weeps over Kili's cold body.

            "If this is love then I don't want it. Take it away, please! Why does it hurt so much?"

            "Because it was real."

Regret

            I told myself once that I would never regret. That I would never forget anyone, that they would not become merely a memory. And yet, as I grow older and meet more people, I wonder if I am wrong. What is life without the good and the bad? How can one cherish the things in life without knowing loss, without having the stinging feeling of regret follow them at least once?

            I thought I knew myself. I thought I knew what I wanted in life, who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live. And yet, there are so many things I cannot do, so many changes I have made for others… When will it be for myself? Perhaps then, only then shall I have no regrets, when my decisions are my own, my life mine to control, mine to live.

            But… I know that shall never be so. Whether it be family, a friend, a lover – my life will never be for myself. It shall always be tied to another, my life hanging on a thread, waiting, watching, willing.

            Who is there to tell of the regret in my heart? Who is there to understand the emotions warring within myself and withhold judgment? Just as you choose your own adventure in a book, flipping from page 3 to page 57, the decision becomes a reality; there is no turning back.

            Perhaps as time passes I will look back and wonder what this vague jumble of words meant to me and laugh at the folly in my mind. Or perhaps, I will feel as Tauriel does, her heart broken from a love she could not have, dictated by the designs of the world she lived in. Her love unexpressed, denied by all except the one who would wait for her. The one who gave his life to see her live.

I only hope that I will be content one day, knowing that my regret turned to happiness. Only time will tell…