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…
