Plaisir d'amour

By Alma Alexander

The adage 'It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all' was probably coined by somebody who hadn't had their heart broken ... yet. But most of us who do our growing up and living and loving in the real world end up putting our hearts on the line, and they get damaged and bruised in the process.

Sometimes having loved and lost is bitter and the grief is brutally hard to transcend. As the old song says, love's pleasures last for a moment... the grief of love lasts for a lifetime.

And still. We would not live without it, without the potential to love and to be in love and to be loved. Because love is what gives us strength, and gives us courage. Love is the thing that keeps us alive. And in the end it all comes down to love - whether you have it or don't have it, whether you feel yourself worthy of it, whether you think you will never know it.

But love is playful, and cunning, and surprising - it comes most often when it is not looked for (and is very good at hiding when it is actively sought...) In the end there is little you can do other than offer up your heart - and believe."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alma Alexander
• Release date: Feb 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465703804

Alma Alexander

Alma Alexander was born in Yugoslavia and has lived in Zambia, Swaziland, Wales, South Africa and New Zealand. She now lives in Washington state, USA. She writes full-time and runs a monthly creative writing workshop with her husband.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Foreword

Coffee Break

Widows' Peak

The Bitter Scent of Moonlight

What Reviewers Say

Other books by Alma Alexander

Contact Alma

About the Author

Foreword

You might know a lovely sweet sad tune which goes by its French name Plaisir d’Amour - its lyrics speak of how the pleasure of love only lasts for a moment while love's woe can last forever.

I moved to New Zealand in the autumn of 1994. By Easter of 1995, I had met a man whom I believed – whom I knew – that I would spend the rest of my life with. He seemed to know it too, and early on in our relationship he asked me, that if I didn’t want to make this ‘long-term’, to walk away immediately. I took it like a gift, gave him all of my heart, and looked forward to … a certain future.

To this day I am not certain what happened next. Something did. The man who was supposed to be the other half of me sort of stopped being with me, even when we were together. Just shy of a year later, after that promise he had exacted about long-termness, he decided that forever was way too long – and couldn’t we just be friends…?

I had thought that being a writer was an indissoluble part of who I was, that I could not exist without being one. But in the wake of having my heart handed back to me in a thousand pieces, I simply… dissassociated. For an entire year I existed in silent limbo, my words and my voices gone, or at the very least my ability to see, hear, acknowledge them. And then, near to breaking, a solitary little voice which was that of my inner writer finally got through to me. It said, Write, or we both die.

So I started to write again.

Predictably, still in mourning, the first stories that emerged in this period belonged to chagrin d’amour, the plaisir being only a distant memory full of regrets. These are not happy stories. But in the manner of the time-honored saying, what did not kill me made me stronger – and they’re good stories. They may be tales of heartbreak and how to survive it, but they’re also by that very definition tales of life and of living. I was alive. I was alive, and dammit, I was a writer. I