It was Orla who filled in the blanks for me, explaining that the two were going steady as a couple since early in June and that they were rarely seen apart, nowadays. I let her tell me what had to be said and nothing more. There were plenty of details I knew I could live without, what with the bare bones of the story giving me more of an impression than I needed. Despite her general affinity toward rambling and her overbearing inability to read a room, Orla appeared to reach the conclusion herself that I was sufficiently content knowing as little as possible about Connie and Jim’s heartwarming romance, and for that, I was eternally grateful.

And I missed her. As a child I read books far beyond my understanding and could never fully empathize with broken-hearted characters or those with lost loves. It never made sense to me why the characters of the old-timey books I loved—Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights—could be so smart and yet so foolish, casting aside everything in place of something so delusional as love. Scarlett O’Hara and her puerile fantasies of Ashley Wilkes caused me to scoff. Why would she continue to pursue a man when he so clearly didn’t love her? Gone with the Wind may well have been my favorite book but that didn’t mean I bore any sympathy for the stupid actions of the characters within. If not for silly notions of an unattainable romance Scarlett would never have found herself so destitute in the end. And then there were the likes of Cathy and Heathcliff whose love only ever caused pain. Love, I firmly believed, was more of an obstacle of the heart than something to celebrate. Jo Marsh—in the beginning, at least—had the right idea.

As I grew a little older, I like to think that I began to understand love better. I read Gone with the Wind a thousand times over and hoped, every time without fail, that the ending might change. And then my heart panged for Willoughby, villain as he was. And I wept silent, shameful tears under the cover of night, alone in my room, for poor Meggie and that stubborn priest of hers. It all naturally set me longing for a romance of my own as it does every teenage girl, much as I swore myself to be a break from the stereotype. Nothing caught my interest as much as a bittersweet ever after, the final pages of a book that left me with a heart clenched in frustration.

But it was only in losing Connie, the closest I would ever come to lost love, that I fully understood the throbbing of a tortured heart. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Those words, meant to reassure, served to haunt me. It would have been preferable to never know what having Connie meant than to know it for a time, only to let it slip away. If I never knew the way she kissed I would never have felt the memory sting my lips. If I never knew the sounds of her moans and her gasps, I would never have heard them echo through my room at night. I missed what I lost far more than I might have missed what I never knew.