Heloise Holds the Sun ✓

3. gifted

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I did not love him because he was perfect. He was far from it.

In many of our popular love stories, lovers act so flatly, like they are made of paper. They act angelically. They are selfless - as if their only motivation in life is to live for one another.

It makes a beautiful story, for paper people encapsulated in paper books, but this is not a story.

He was a real man. I was a real woman. He was selfish, as any of us are if we're being honest. So was I. Isn't wanting in any form - even if it is desire for another - selfish?

But our selfishness burned differently. In opposing ways, even. Oh, I will stop blabbering and tell you what I mean.

See, he introduced himself to me as Abelard, right there in my uncle's study. Not even "Pierre". Abelard. I would learn later on that he had made this surname name up. He was born with another name, but this one sounded better - it rolled off the tongue easier. He was going to be famous; he knew it. I was merely in his wake as he pushed toward this one steady goal.

It festered in his eyes, this need to be great.

I cannot act a Saint now. If I am honest with myself, it is what drew me to him. This passion. It is hard to find.

I didn't speak a single word as my uncle and Abelard sat down across the desk, discussing schedules and payments and lesson plans. I was a good 10 years younger than Abelard, but he was much younger than my uncle was. Still, he puffed his chest out and deepened his voice and shook my uncle's hand like an equal. They spoke about me, standing there to the side of them, as if I was a child under their care.

I gritted my teeth and narrowed my eyes on Abelard.

He was captivating. He knew it.

I promised myself then and there that I would not let myself fall into his charm easily. That he would have to work for it. Too easily, he charmed everyone else.

He only caught my eyes twice in that dusty study, and it was in a vague gesture toward me as he spoke. Still, it stung each time; and if he felt it too, he didn't show it. His eyes would merely flicker back toward Fulbert.

"She is very gifted, you will see," uncle said, and I scoffed at it. It was an understatement.

Already, just in the brief time I'd been in Paris, those in monastic circles had come to know me as a scholar with great potential. As you know, this is difficult for a woman to become known for. Especially young as I was.

But I would rather spend all my time with the great minds of the monastics who visited, picking their arguments apart and debating them until they grew weary. I wrote and wrote like it was my lifeline. I had nothing else to do in those lonely cloisters. I would present my writings to the monks and the priests, and they would bring me forth to all the teachers and the scholars they knew, saying I was a wonder. They'd never seen a girl so young, largely self-taught, master the trivium and quadrivium - in my studies in arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric, music, geography, astronomy, and theology, I was impeccable. How many men could say the same?

They congratulated my uncle for willing my pursuit of education. Great minds, they figured, should be fostered. My uncle came to be very invested indeed in the furthering of my education.

Make no mistake: I was a scholar in my own right. Abelard did not teach me what I know.

History will know me merely as Abelard's lover. But if it had been reversed - if I had been born a man... I would have shone just as bright as he did.

Luckily many of my musings have been inscribed into time. They are in his books, under his name, but still they live. Such is the life of us women. Living in the brackets of our great men; living in their footnotes...

"So I have heard," Abelard lifted his blue eyes to meet mine at my uncle's statement. He had heard? Rumours of Fulbert's brilliant niece - had they really spread so far?

I itched under his gaze. But I refused to look away. I would stand my ground; I was his equal. At least his equal.

God, do I ever wish I kept my defences.

You see, I fastened myself to him every bit as strongly as he fastened himself to greatness. But he could not be great as long as he loved me; and I could not have him as long as he pursued his fame.

And these two goals... they ate each other alive.

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