A Quest for Love

My quest for love is not unlike the quest for the Holy Grail.

The quest for the Holy Grail starts as a noble mission – that is, to find a relic of divine origin – but quickly becomes a bloody journey marked with death, treachery and despair. My quest for love that would last is not so different. Instead of having bloody corpses as milestones, however, it is marked with tears and scars – a long river of tears, both shed and unshed, and a heart disfigured beyond recognition. And like the quest for the Holy Grail, every time I thought that I had found what I was looking for, I was proved wrong.

So far, every chapter of my quest in search of this elusive thing called “love” has ended in heart-wrenching failure. Along the way, I met different characters. There was the virtuous priest, the charming devil, the egoistic scholar, the deceptive beggar, the indifferent wanderer, the insecure merchant, the rash scribe, and the vanishing sorcerer. Each one of them left me with a deep gash in my heart, bleeding to the point of atrophy. Ah! Atrophy – le mot juste!

The blame rests not only in those people, though. They may have stabbed my heart, but I was the fool who let them. There were also some of them who handed me knives and let me stab my own heart. Whatever, they all ended fatally anyway.

As for my heart in atrophy, I do not know if it can function as such anymore. What I am sure of, however, is that it shall never be the same as it was before the quest.

I don’t quite remember what it is that I was looking for in the start or if I even knew what it was I was looking for in the first place. I am now beginning to doubt if this quest that I have undertaken is nothing more than a fool’s errand. I fear that the day when I will not even recognise love is in sight.

Alas! Love loses its lustre as this quest continues.

I have lost too much in this quest, and what little I have gained along the way does not do much to compensate for it.

I am tired, and yet I can not rest.

On the morrow, I shall face the angel.

Did Heaven send him to heal me? Or was he sent to deal the final blow? Whatever it is, I pray that he arrives soon.

My heart is giving out.