Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes in Love in the Time of Cholera: "Think of love as a state of grace; not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself." What happens when two people fall in love? The attraction turns into courtship that goes into commitment, which is also when a couple gets married. It marks a watershed when romantic love enters into the conjugal protocol when two lovers must take their places in life as husband and wife. They give birth to children, raise them and grow old, the fire of passion dying each day as togetherness turns into daily rotation. Even if this couple manages to stay married until the end, love fades away like the color of fabric does with successive washes. It's said that the failure of love is often seeded in its success.
The stories in this collection speak of other kinds of love-unrequited and unsuccessful-when lovers either couldn't express their feelings for their beloveds or failed to take their relationships to the logical conclusion. Each of these stories is based on real people, names and events tweaked to hide their identities. These stories are about heartbreaks when luckless lovers parted their ways and went through life like amputees forever haunted by the ghost of their missing limbs.
These lovers had no choice but to live on the memories of aborted relationships, forced to suffer sleepless nights and agonies of separation by heaving mournful sighs in the manner of prisoners counting days. Many of them married and dutifully raised families, but longed for a glimpse of their former lovers if not a reunion or another chance to love them again. Some of them were fortunate to reunite as the hands of fate motioned their lives towards convergence. Others weren't as lucky because death separated them for a second time before they had a chance to recover from the havoc of the first separation. But all of them treasured love in their hearts like worship sustains faith
