writing_shadows

Hope is the mother of all disappointment; I know that more than most people, because I have had my hopes raised extraordinarily high.

When I was twenty I was offered the world by the man I loved. I’m sure if I asked any of the Society they would tell me I was a fool to think it could end well – even Ms Ashley, now that she has broken free of Ricky Royal, doesn’t believe in that sort of happy ending – but I was young and in love and we all do stupid things when we’re young and in love.

And all right, we don’t all crack open the doors between this universe and another, infinitely more terrible, but it alike in kind if not in scale. Really what we did showed no greater disregard for our own or anyone else’s lives than, say, drinking and driving. It just so happened that the ‘car’ – to extend the metaphor – wanted to consume the earth in an orgy of slaughter and destruction.

Which I’m not claiming wasn’t a bad thing, and of course if I had it to do over, I’d do things differently. It is not as if I went untouched. I lived, but I lost my lover, my friends; and my time in the psychiatric ward probably did for my chances of a first.

And worst of all, I saw all my hopes of a better world; a world where he and I would make right all that we saw as wrong – shatter before my eyes.

Hope sets you up for a fall. Hope makes you vulnerable; it gives you something to lose, and people with something to lose always hold back. Better not to have hope; better to strive in stubborn despair.

That’s why I tried so hard not to hope for anything from Michael Batman and Emma Poole; that’s why I wasn’t disappointed in them.

That’s why I tried not to hope that anything would come of the business of the Kings. All right; I didn’t do so well there.

I do not know if Ms Ashley has the strength to see this through, but I know that she carries all my hopes with her. I shall be rather put out if I turn out to be mistaken again.