Summer Soap (Episode 7): Finally, Charlotte had decided on her future

Called Charlotte’s Choice, this story is about a Cork woman and her tangled love life, and was written by Gabrielle Dufrene, from the MA in Creative Writing Programme at UCC. Catch up with previous episodes at echolive.ie. In the seventh episode, Charlotte is in turmoil as she debates her future... finally, her mind is made up...

CHARLOTTE passed the rest of the week in a trance, the future hanging heavy before her, murky and grey.

Seán tried calling her over 20 times, and she was sure he would have shown up at her door if he’d had her address. Finally, she sent a simple reply:

“I just need some time to think. I’m sorry.”

He was silent after that.

Gregory’s business trip couldn’t have come at a better time. She knew the preoccupation would be spelled plainly across her face, and although her fiancé did possess that dense inability to pick up on female emotion, surely this would not have escaped his notice.

The guilt precluded her from thinking straight, but she attempted to make sense of the pieces of the puzzle through Pros and Cons lists in her diary.

This was a moment, one of the few in life, where she could see herself standing clearly on a precipice, at a fork in the road.

She considered the future, the life of comfort and wellbeing and guaranteed security for herself and her children that Gregory could provide. She thought of the invitations that would have to be cancelled, of the questions she’d have to answer, of having to see him marry someone else.

But. But, she thought. If I really loved him, how could I have done this?

And worse yet, as the days passed, she began to view what she’d done with Seán not as a crime, but as something inevitable that had already been ordained.

She thought of her promise to his mother, to those orphaned children that were like siblings to her. Would life with Seán really be so bad? Endless nights under stars and rolling fields and the indescribable feeling of safety he provided her? A sense of knowing and being known that, as much as she wished she could say she had, she’d never possessed with Gregory?

She sat atop the bed, penning her musings into the notebook, and when she was finished, she hugged her knees to her chest and breathed deeply. She listened to a guided meditation, after which she began to feel the answer flow through her capillaries into every cell of her being. The answer terrified her.

She had worked so hard to pave a life that would guarantee peace, ease, and freedom. What would they say of her selfishness?

Dear Gregory,

She began, and faltered. How do you deliver news that would bring one future to a crashing halt?

Perhaps the knowledge that it would be the beginning of another, brighter, more honest one.

Charlotte noticed that the sun had suddenly come out, and before she continued, she felt that she needed to greet it, to baptise her new life before the dominoes began to fall.

She left her diary open atop the bed, then got dressed and applied a quick layer of make-up before stepping out of the apartment and into the bright afternoon light.