"We Are Each The Love Of Someone's Life"...

"We are each the love of someone's life."

So begins "The Confessions of Max Tivoli", a novel by Andrew Sean Greer that I highly recommend for a summer read. The story (which is a little bit Benjamin-Button like) follows the life of Max Tivoli born into an old man's body who grows younger with time. But the real center of the story is about love - specifically his love for one woman his entire life. Due to his unusual circumstances, she never knows the truth about Max and he must find her at various points in their lives and love her in a different way. It's a beautiful and romantic love story written with insight that is almost poetic. A sampling....

"It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart."

"What do we abandon to claim our heart's desire? What do we become?"

"If I am lucky...I will float down the current until it meets the river, slowly, over weeks, for I will just be sleeping, still alive, growing younger every hour, as the river takes me along its swelling center, a boy, a child, ever younger until I am at last a little baby floating under the stars, a shivering baby, dreaming of no particular thing - borne into the dark womb of the sea."

And now for a "Confession of Theresa Link", I am a bit of a romantic at heart. But the deeper confession is this...(and don't laugh or judge me), but a couple years ago, when Prince William married Kate Middleton, I actually took the day off from work so that I could get up in the middle of the night and watch the entire event from the procession through London to the vows to the final wave from the balcony. I don't have any particular feeling about the monarchy itself - my attraction is really based more on little girl fantasies about kings, and queens, and castles, and a romance that will become a part of history. We see history happen every day but most often it is the tragic or the frightening that is our focus. However, this event was history in the making for a completely different reason - for pure romance. And I loved every minute of it. Today, their love story continues as the royal baby is in the process of entering the world...and their own place in history...their own place in the fairy tale. 

"We are each the love of someone's life". Whether it is a quiet love in the small town where we were raised, or a love story that will be documented in the pages of history, what's the harm in hoping for the fairy tale? Just for today, take a moment to relish in a romance.