DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, 116

1. Going Forward

It was familiar. My dreams were always familiar, like a novel that you read repeatedly. However, unlike turning the page and knowing what you would read next, I never seemed to get comfortable with my dreams. Like the sound of a clock’s chime when you know you have an appointment you would rather not keep. It might be very musical, almost enjoyable, but with some unwelcome impending event looming over your head, the chime becomes brass, and sharp; irritating rather than pleasant.

This dream was like my others, familiar, but confusing. I found myself in the meadow, “our” meadow. The one where, Edward and I had declared ourselves to each other. Our relationship was “young” in terms of time and convention. However, neither Edward nor I saw us as young or conventional. My mother once told me that I was born 35 years old. I never quite understood what she meant by that, until I came to Forks to live with my dad. Until I met Edward, who like me, was an old soul, in a young body. The difference was, he was a much older soul than I was, but now was also younger. Being a vampire, Edward was not aging. Being perpetually 17, I had now passed him in age by over a year, having celebrated my eighteenth birthday, and getting close to my nineteenth.

My last birthday was an event I tried very hard to eliminate from my memory; the birthday, and the chain of events that it set into motion. The worst being Edward’s self-sacrificing attempt at leaving me for my own good, after his vampire brother, Jasper, tried to kill me. My separation from Edward was the darkest, most painful time of my life, and one that I knew I could not endure again. Had it not been for my best friend Jacob Black, I would not have survived the first time.