Why not?

You dare not approach the woman you love, after all. You lurk in the shadows, convince yourself a life together will never be, and slink away in arrogant despair. Better to lie to those who want to be lied to and be rich, or at least tell the truth to those who would pay for the truth, than tell the truth to those who want nothing with it; it is easier to produce what others ask of you than to create what your soul demands from your own hands.

So be it, crooked soul. Live knowing you chose the lesser while the best was before you. Live your second loves, your second choices, your second thoughts, your secondary desires. Live your damned second life straight to hell, for that is where it came from, what it is, and where it shall lead you.

Perhaps the gods will take pity on you, if you pray hard enough. They may listen to your dying wish and grant you a second chance.

Then again, perhaps not.

You have left your first love, accuses the voice from the heavens. You have become lukewarm, neither hot or cold. You are salt that has lost its savour, worth nothing more than to be tossed out and trampled underfoot. A spineless parasite unwilling to die as long as it can still satisfy its base desires in a backalley, in the arms of a kept woman, in anything other than her.

That first and greatest love is too precious to be tainted by your clumsy, hungry fingers, too pristine to engage with the messiness of reality, too perfect to be allowed contact with your not-quite-snow-white heart. The ideal must never be realized — for what if it is not what you have dreamed, what if it is greater than you can bear, what if it demands more of you than you have ever given anything or anyone (even yourself)?

It is all just a dream, is it not, to actually marry the person you love, to spend a life doing what your soul yearns after, to let your mind and soul and spirit rest in the bosom of the beloved in absolute peace, never wanting to leave their side.

You say: Others are blessed to claim that life, they are rich enough to fund their own pipe dreams, their voices are loud enough to garner attention, they are attractive to the ones they are drawn to, at their birth the stars aligned and the angels sang.

Yet your heart of lies mutters the truth once on a moonless night. There appears a world within the breathing liquid in your glass or in the smoke from the fire between your fingers and you see what could have been, what should have been if you had not spurned the humiliating price of effort that other life would have asked of you.

Devotion it demands. Attention it inhales. Time it swallows. Excuses it scoffs at. Fear it obliterates.

Or at least, it would have.

And you would also see within that world what you have made yourself become for having been drawn to all else but that deepest, truest love — drawn to others out of what, fear? lust? despair? — anything but the all-consuming wonder and goodness you cannot help but still turn back to gaze upon.

And still you walk away and choose the other woman.

Why?

Why make the first secondary, or not at all? Why entertain anything else?

Why?

So that you could take your mistress at all hours of the day like an animal driven wild by self-hatred even as you resent her for what you have imposed upon her through your twisted lust. So that you could look into her eyes and say what only belongs to the beloved and sneer at the pang of sheer pain in your mistress’ eyes as you both taste the metallic saltiness of your worse-than-hollow words. So that you would at least feel a woman’s touch even if your very soul chafes under her caresses and you pretend to hate her (amidst the arguments and lies and more lies in the “making up” afterwards) even though you cannot hide from the fact that it is you who have made her a whore and have dehumanized her for your own sick pleasure.

They say dying for love is irrational and dying without love is a tragedy.

But to live with a substitute?