Crossing The Line

Prologue || Luena Knightley

Dramatis Personae
Luena: Her Mindscape

Dilemma: A lovesick girl caught between the idyllic notion of romance and the cold reality of unrequited affection, desperately seeking to make sense of love's unpredictable nature while floating in the liminal space of friendship and desire.

Act 1

My understanding of love has always been shaped by what I've seen on stage. The great dramas and plays are filled with the eternal themes of desire, devotion, misunderstanding, and heartbreak—themes that stir emotions but feel distant, like stories written to be played out by others. Watching these grand portrayals from the safety of a theater seat, love seemed both tragic and beautiful, but ultimately something that belonged to someone else. I absorbed it through art, never expecting to feel it myself. But love, in the real world, is far different from the artifice of the stage. When those themes become your own, they are no longer poetic—they are unbearable.

I suppose a child's first experience of love begins with their parents. My own parents seemed, for many years, like the perfect example of that devotion. I grew up under their loving gaze, believing that love was a thing that could be steady, constant. That was my foundation, my privilege, and my naivety. So you can imagine the devastation when that foundation cracked, and my parents divorced when I was twelve. That moment shattered my idea of love, revealing it for what it truly is: fleeting. Temporary. A delicate thing that, no matter how strong it seems, can be undone in a moment.

It's no wonder, then, that poets and playwrights fill their works with endless stanzas, dialogues, and soliloquies on love. They spend their days and nights writing about it, hoping to capture its essence, to make it last in some form on paper, in words. But their writing is a reflection of their longing. They want love to last, to endure beyond the limitations of real life. But it doesn't. It never does. Love is temporary, no matter what anyone says. It doesn't last forever. It fades, changes, or, as I saw with my parents, simply disappears.

After their separation, I made a vow. I decided I would never fall in love, never subject myself to that kind of vulnerability. Why start something that is destined to end? Why give it a beginning when the ending is inevitable? Love, with all its promises, seemed to me like an illusion—one that I wanted no part of. And for a time, that decision shielded me. I observed love in others but kept myself apart from it.

But life, as it always does, had other plans. Despite my resolve, love found me. And the cruelest irony of it all? I fell in love with the one person I never wanted to—a person who was not only my best friend but someone I considered family: Damìan Moreno-Jones.

Damìan and I have been inseparable since we were toddlers. For most of my life, I saw him as a brother. Someone who was always there, someone I could count on, who knew me better than anyone else. Our friendship was easy, uncomplicated. And yet, somewhere along the way, things shifted. Slowly, imperceptibly, my feelings for him began to change.

There's no single moment I can point to as the beginning of my love for him. When I lie in bed at night, just before sleep takes me, I try to pinpoint it—was it during one of our childhood adventures, or a moment shared as teenagers when he made me laugh? But I can't. Our lives together are like a long, continuous reel, each moment blending into the next. It's as if the love I feel for him was always there, hidden beneath the surface, only now rising to the forefront. And now that it's there, it refuses to leave. No matter how hard I try to push it away, no matter how much I tell myself it's wrong, that he'll never feel the same, I can't stop feeling it.

It's not healthy, I know that. It's not healthy to let someone occupy so much space in your mind, to think about them constantly, to feel this pull toward them every time they're near. But I can't help it. Damìan is woven into the fabric of my life, and untangling myself from these feelings feels impossible.

My favorite poet, Khalil Gibran, wrote, "Love that does not renew itself every day becomes a habit, in turn, a slavery." And I think about those words often, because that's the irony of love, isn't it? It creeps up on you, consumes you, and even when you try to fight it, the feeling only grows stronger. It becomes a habit, something you can't break free from, no matter how much you want to. And when that love is unrequited—when the person you love doesn't see you the same way—it becomes a kind of torture.

That's what I'm living in now. Torture. Because Damìan doesn't love me the way I love him. At least, I don't think he does. And that's the worst part—not knowing. Not knowing if he'll ever look at me with the same affection, if he'll ever see me as anything more than his best friend. Falling in love with him feels like falling into a pit with no way out. You don't see it coming, and once you're in, you can't escape. That's why it's called "falling," after all.

How long can this go on? How long can I keep this secret buried? He's my best friend, and I don't want to lose him. The thought of telling him, of risking everything we have, terrifies me. What if he doesn't feel the same? What if, by confessing, I ruin the one relationship in my life that I can't imagine living without?

I fear that day. I fear the moment I might slip, let the truth spill out in a moment of vulnerability. Because if I lose him—if he ever finds out and doesn't feel the same way—it would be like losing the one person in this world who truly knows me, who sees me. And that's a loss I don't think I could bear.

So here I am, lovesick and floating above the surface of unrequited affection, trying to make sense of a love I never wanted, but now can't imagine living without.