Fiction: In The Beginning (Part 1)

By Victoria Reilly

It has been said that the things you most adore in a person soon become great liabilities, much sooner than you may think. You find yourself thinking that you’re in love with someone, that you’d move heaven and earth just to be with them, and next thing you can’t stand being with them and the thought of them alone leaves you seething. They become nothing more than a piece of antiquated furniture in your life and for no real reason at all. I never thought it, but that became true of him and me.

His crooked front teeth that, in the beginning, I found adorable, now left me wondering why the brace he’d had hadn’t fixed it. The mole on this right cheek and the freckles on his back, so faint and secret that, in the beginning, I’d find myself tracing for hours with my fingertips were now so obvious they were almost eyesores. The way his voice sounds in the morning and the very way he’d play with my hair, all of the things I used to love the most in the beginning suddenly felt irritating. Even his eyes, the deepest brown I had ever seen, looked almost black. And I wondered what on earth the point was in that.

But that’s the thing you don’t always realise in the beginning. Sometimes you have to become acutely aware of a person’s flaws before you can really fall in love with them.

<< Part 2 Next Week! >>