My literary life...

and the wonderful delusions that come with it. As I was writing in a letter to a friend the other day, I've long since liked to pretend as though my life were some epic novel. I've read about people such as this in my English classes - heroines that seem to think that life is one ironic story. They see heroes in ruined men who only have the capacity to disappoint, see in themselves a resolve to suffer solely because it makes life more beautiful.
For some reason this gives me hope and this has mostly to do with the poetry life can contain when sought out. I have no reason to believe that my life isn't, in some way, literary. I had a trying semester that ended badly, I stepped out of my world, journeyed to a new one, and had a life-defining experience. I was in denial, faced the truth, felt acutely all of the actions that could have morphed into an elaborate tapestry of regret, finished a book on a train to Paris, and instead, I forgave myself. Then I began to live. I could have become more guarded, could have decided that my open nature was unwise, and changed in order to feel less. Instead, I've embraced even more who I am because I've had to reevaluate the reasoning behind it.
If I imagine my life as a novel (hopefully a well-written one), it gives senseless things definition. Characters, the ones at least that play a part in an important experience, leave prematurely, but usually come back at the most appropriate time. I leave this city that witnessed my most honest and raw moments; in a plotline, it doesn't follow that I won't return.
There have been many times already that I've felt as though this life view was foolish. Real life isn't poetic, loose ends are left untied every day. I look back, though, on everything up to this point and I simply see no reason not to be hopelessly Romantic (yes, capital R) in regard to life. Forgive me for wanting to live in a world where things are unpredictable in their beautiful predictability, their poetic endings. Forgive me in advance for inflicting upon you, those I'm close with, all the multi-faceted intrigue of a dynamic character. It's just my nature.

And in the word's of Gibran, who now seems to be the author of this transitional stage in my life:
Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.
And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward: and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.
Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.
But as he descended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:
How shall I goin peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city. (Gibran Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet)