ltroifanatic wrote:Boy some good reading there.Oskar at 40 is just brilliant.It was done so well I found it hard to read.It's so hard to read un-happy endings.Especially as we all want our little heroes to be happy together forever.How he called Eli names and seemed to hate him tore my heart to peices.It was so sad but as an alternative ending it was done so well.Very believable.Thank goodness the other stories were there (all of them were fantastic) so I could read them after Oskar at 40 to relieve my trauma.Thanks for posting them.
Measure your capacity for hatred. This is also the measure of your capacity for love.
Oskar's gotten to be a pretty rough customer, with wiry muscles and steely nerve, and he's definitely not somebody you want to run into in a dark alley because he has the will of somebody who still has something to lose. For all that he calls Eli things like "bitch" and "queen", he continues to live with her; he continues to live
for her. He fully understands that his life could end without warning at any time, especially when he goes out to gather food, but he doesn't think about it because the one thought he cannot bear is that she might die before he does. She's eternal, you see, and the couple of centuries of life she'd had before they'd met are a promise to him that she'll still be around a couple centuries after he's gone.
Is he resentful towards her sometimes? Probably. Does he miss the life he'd once had, when he had a hot meal every night and a warm bed to tuck into every night? I should imagine so. Does he blame her for having taken him out of that life? Sometimes, maybe, when he's deep in his cups and has forgotten what that life was really like.
But she saved his life at least once - and once is enough - and now he has the self-assigned obligation to return the favour in like kind. He's gotten to be a rough customer with a nasty attitude, but some of that roughness comes from the certain knowledge that he's defending her against an entire world. He's probably never really felt big enough, strong enough, fast enough or smart enough for the job, and now he's forty. Well...
now, he's more than 40. He's getting slower, maybe he's started forgetting things, maybe he's not as strong as he used to be, maybe he's had some injuries over the years that aren't helping him get around. How is he to provide and watch out for her when he starts doddering for real?
Make no mistake: if he'd honestly started hating her, it'd have been child's play to chuck her out the window on a hot, sunny summer afternoon, and it'd have been even easier just to hike out to the highway, stick out a thumb and vanish. If nothing else, Eli has certainly taught him how to fend for himself; it doesn't matter where he might go or what he might do,
without her, life would be so much simpler in practical terms.
But he won't. He can't. She is, after all, still exactly the same girl he fell in love with so many years ago.