Prologue: Passing Guest, An Experiment in Love
Note: This is the prologue of my book Passing Guest (2021). More on the book here.
This book is an experiment. And it wasn’t really planned. For quite some time, I had been wanting to write about love. I wasn’t sure how to do it. I found it an extremely complex topic to approach in the shape of a fictional story. Yet, I was fascinated by it. I often wondered, if love is so full of life, so essentially human, why was I finding love so difficult to grasp as the subject matter of a new book?
Love has the ability to drive us crazy. But because it emanates from our hearts, it can also give us direction. But only if we want to learn how to listen to it. Love is ever-changing. It doesn’t know how to stand still because it is the result of the seemingly impossible: Two strangers finding a way to be in sync. To rise and fall together. To create a bond from the unknown. A connection that makes it very hard to run away from each other. If people are dynamic and unpredictable, love must be too… Perhaps this is why it is so attractive and scary at the same time, and the reason I was finding it so hard to write about.
Truth is, I was stuck because I was focusing on putting into words things that can’t be explained, or even suggested. I was creatively approaching love the wrong way. If love can only be experienced, I must pay attention to the uniqueness of that experience. The kindness and the compassion that emanate from love and which make human relationships possible, beyond romantic love.
During the Covid-19 pandemic and the long lockdowns that we experienced in the United Kingdom, I was able to make time to do something that I love: to take to the streets and let random strangers surprise me. I sat in parks, and I spent hours walking, letting bystanders fill the gap left by the isolation that came with the imposed social distance. Certainly, my past as a journalist influenced my new lockdown ritual.
When we rush, we don’t have time to experience the environment, the people we share our surroundings with. We are fully disconnected from everyone and everything that is not part of our routine. However, during the slow-paced life of the pandemic, my daily walks gave me the opportunity to go back to the beautiful feeling of paying attention to details. To how we do things, and how we deal with the most insignificant moments of our lives. These moments that we take for granted but are such an integral part of our daily lives. Small actions such as crossing the street, picking up our groceries at the shop, the way we walk, smile, cry, exercise, arrange our clothes, clean the house, read a book, wave our hand, write a note, say thank you, get mad, the way we take care of each other… the way we love! These apparently insignificant moments that we easily forget why they matter are the big storytellers of how we live life.
Likewise, I wanted to experiment with the things that are familiar to us and how they can connect us to world views that are beyond what we see as the norm. Elements from our daily lives such as our cities, our parks, a bench, our house plants, our friends, our neighbours, our books, music, schooling, the people on the streets, our families, a rooftop, the sea, the rain, the moon, the water, and ultimately storytelling - which is inherent in humankind and one of the best ways to immortalise experiences and give voice to others - can potentially connect us to others in a way that enables to explore life’s possibilities beyond what is close to our known realities.
With these ideas in mind, I got out my old notes on love and I came up with a creative writing exercise. For eight weekends in a row - no excuses! - I would draft one fully fictional love story. I created some rules for myself on how to do it. I would imagine how some of the random people I saw on the streets would experience love. What would they tell me if we had the chance to have a conversation about love? Would they have any regrets? Would they be in love? Heartbroken, maybe? Were they missing someone? Would they even believe in love? What do they think about friendship? Were they feeling lonely? How do they see others?
I wondered what they would think if I told them I was dreaming a different life for them. A new future that was triggered by a new possibility of love, of compassion and kindness toward others…With this in mind, I wrote their dreamed stories almost as if it was some sort of a journalistic reportage or news column retold in the first person. Honouring their experience, their voice and the reason their hypothetical love-experience would matter to our social fabric. Their imaginary stories became a reminder of the importance of many small human acts of kindness that, for many people, were no longer available during the pandemic.
During the lockdowns, these nameless random strangers kept me company. They set my imagination free and they let me transport myself to the possibility of new and unique ways of living. They brought me closer to the life of others. Almost as if I was able to travel in time and space through their imaginary experiences. Unknowingly, they gave me hope in the midst of the pandemic and I am thankful to them.
For the same reason that this book would not be possible without the unconditional support of my good friend, Anna-Marie Savio. She selflessly offered to spend many hours of her time reading and re-reading my work, giving me valuable honest feedback. And this is how the fictional love stories motivated by those random strangers took on a dimension of their own. They deepened our friendship during the pandemic. These imaginary stories gave us both hope. They kept us going!
This book is a collection of eight fully fictional short stories on love, kindness and hope. Each one of them delves into the possibilities of finding or escaping love, where love takes many different forms and shapes. They are followed by an additional short story to commemorate International Women’s Day. And a new creative piece on love that I never published before.
Passing Guest starts with a first-person introduction by an imaginary character. A woman who asks herself some questions about love. She embodies the essence of the enigmas of love and hope that many different people I met throughout my adult life shared with me. These people all seemed to disagree on everything when it comes to describing and experiencing love. But they all clearly agreed with one simple thing: love is magic.
Some people told me once, they believed people tend to expect love to be something else, someone else, somewhere else… This is why, like the best magic tricks, we might have an act of love and kindness in front of our eyes, and we might fail to see it. Complex human beings that we are, we tend to make love complicated. So this is how this imaginary character takes on a journey of her own in which she incarnates eight different possibilities of love and life.
Her quest takes her to Hong Kong, South Korea, North Korea and neighbouring mainland China, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Uganda, Senegal, and the cities of London and Barcelona. As she tries to find her answers, she transports herself to different universes, possibilities of being and seeing, and ultimately of finding love.
With love there is hope for a better future. When we build a certain love connection - a bond of kindness - things will always feel better. There is no better hope in life than having someone by our side who is capable of making our life fuller. Soon she discovers that who she is (and who we are) can only be answered by the magic of love, which is as beautifully unique as every single one of us who makes up our diverse humanity.
Love is freedom!
Passing Guest Playlist
Book cover design by Josep Maria Mir + Roderic Molins