She will be loved.

She’s not coming. After all the waiting, she’s not coming. She won’t make it. She can’t afford to.

When the world caves in, where will you be? Sitting at your desk in the study on a quiet Sunday afternoon, with an exam looming on the corner. That’s where I was. A final defiant sigh against the crushing tide. Much like Tolkien’s dream of “a great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness inescapable”. Powerless at the turning of the tide. Like sand swiftly washed away.

To extend the tide analogy further, Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all voyage of their life is bound in shadows and in miseries.” On one hand, carpe diem! Seize the moment, deal with it, and move on. Yet on the other, the abject misery of having your hopes crushed, and what you’ve been waiting for, the validation of two years of waiting, taken away suddenly in a few simple words, “I won’t be coming down to study”; that makes all the difference in the world. Tack on “I don’t know where we stand”, and you find yourself standing at the edge of an active volcano, idly wondering how fast it would take you to fall into the fiery depths below.

There never is a good time for hopes to be crushed. But for her sake, for our sake, I will have to soldier on. As much as it affects me, it most definitely affects her. And I cannot afford to sit and wallow in misery. Not now. Not with an exam looming and the prospect of a cold lonely winter before me. Not with another crushed hope beside me. The road less travelled is often the road forwards, and though I may walk through the proverbial valley of darkness, I cannot afford to fear the shadow, though I feel it creeping ever silently into the depths of my heart. The chill touch of death, perhaps?