Avenoir

Avenoir - Marlena

avenoir - n. the desire that memory could flow backward

We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you've been, but not where you're going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way...

Marlena 

I enter Kristen's hospital room with only one thought in my mind, to confront her about her duplicity, her lies, and her manipulation of John, and of me.

I have been so damn patient. So many times, I have almost told him how I feel, but I have stopped short. At first because I felt it wasn't fair, after pushing him away for so long, to suddenly confess my love for him. Because I honestly thought I didn't deserve him after everything I put him through. And then because I thought he was happy with her.

He seemed to be, after we returned from Aremid. To keep me safe from Stefano and his obsessive pursuit of me, John convinced me to move into the DiMera mansion for a time and during those months I was forced to watch them. I watched them from doorways, from out of the corner of my eye. I walked into rooms to find them wrapped around each other, their mouths suctioned together, their hands clutching at each other's bodies. I happened upon them laughing, touching, and kissing more times than I would like to count.

It broke my heart a little every time I saw them together, but I figured it was my punishment for pushing him away after Roman left. For not being honest with myself when he saved me from the Devil.

Once, during those interminable weeks, looking back now, I think maybe he almost told me he still had feelings for me. But I stupidly trusted her. I trusted a DiMera, more fool me.

I took her at face value and believed the façade of kind, caring, embarrassed friend. I let her play on my guilt and my love for him, and I naïvely let her convince me that he felt nothing for me but friendship. She told me he felt guilty and beholden to me, and she persuaded me that I should be clear that all I felt for him was friendship, so that he could move on with her with a clear conscience.

I should have known better. I am a professional, for goodness' sake. It is my job to see beneath the deceit, to unravel the artfully woven fabric of lies and half-truths. Of guile and manipulation. I had seen enough of it with Stefano. I should have seen through her cunning and all the ways she sought to bind John to her in the wake of her faithlessness in Aremid.

But I didn't. I was gullible. I was blinded by my own guilt, by my desire to put his happiness first. And by her trickery and the falsehoods masked by the smile of someone I once believed a friend.

And then I found the letter. A letter he wrote to me in his cell in Aremid, waiting for what he thought to be certain death in the gas chamber. A letter where he declared his love for me.

But the love we shared was something special, Doc. There never was, and never could be, anyone to fill the special place that you hold in my heart. I love you. I know now, I always have, and I always will.

I can recite it by heart. When I found it, between the leaves of a romance book, a book of Kristen's, I was confused. But oh, once I read it, I was incandescent with joy and full to brimming with hope and anticipation. I read it over and over again, running my fingertips over the words he had inscribed. He had written those words with fingers that had once touched me, once made my body sing with desire and want. And the words he wrote, touched my soul in the same way his fingers had brought my body to life. Suddenly everything was different, suddenly I was alive again. I had hope and I could see a future for us, for our family.