Image credit: Amy Johansson

I am a creature of meticulous research. While it would be wonderful to woo my love in the conventional sense and gradually bring her to our home to be through the more normal rites of romantic passage, I am realistic enough to know that leaves a good deal to chance. And I am not a man who is open to risk where it can be avoided.

But to capture a butterfly has its own risks and challenges. And there is where my particular talents and eye for detail will serve me well.

Every human being has routines even if they delude themselves to think they are too free-spirited to be above that. None of us can truly escape our essential natures or our habits. Early philosophers would tell you freedom is only achieved through breaking out of oneself and one’s desires, but I dispute this. It is not even possible, at best we follow our own will, as Kant would have it, and we pretty much determine what is right and wrong from that. Overlay that with our upbringing and our society and the whole concept of freedom becomes entirely relative. But for all that may be elastic across groups of people, it is not so flexible within any given person. We all are what we are and nothing more or less.

And so my lovely Violet has her patterns. From careful, hidden study over weeks I have ascertained her work schedule. I also know that one two evenings a week after work she sometimes goes to classes to further her culinary skill further. It is clear she does not wish to be only a pastry chef, but something much more cosmopolitan. On those days she occasionally also joins fellow classmates for a late coffee or nightcap afterwards. They are therefore not good days to plan our first real, and decisive, assignation, though happily her attendance at class and these after class coffees are both quite irregular. In this way she would not be missed for some time, if at all, if she failed to continue to attend.

Weekends she often goes away. I was worried this could be to some establish rendezvous with a man, or possibly with family. In either case it would have meant a very high risk of her being seen as missing very quickly and by those with more than a rudimentary, casual friendship interest in her. Agreeably, having paid for very discreet private detective research, I learned she is always on her own on these travels– her family, what there is of it, live in another town and she has no boyfriend or even closer group of friends here as yet. It seems she moved here only relatively recently, for her career development, and has yet to really establish herself, find roots in the city.

Well, she shall find that with me.

But as to her weekend visits, it seems it is solitary journeys as I said. I flatter myself she is lonely precisely for the same reason I am – that we are not yet together, and that part of her soul knows she is simply waiting for that right connection to make itself known and give the true and destined shape to her life.

But still, it may be that my beloved has some inherent wanderlust in her that may prove tiresome and difficult in our early time together. I shall need to be empathic with what will feel, to her, like a real curtailment of her freedom. In time she will see the vistas and travels we will take together – journeys into the mind the heart and the soul – have so much more to offer, so much more flavour. But at first I can see, she may rebel a bit, and I should be a kind, if stern host, until she realises her mistake.

Otherwise, her other weekday evenings she spends alone in a small flat not far from her work. I am not sure if she chose such a humble abode due to its work proximity or due to available funds, or both. Either way, it is helpfully a nondescript unit in a small, almost deserted block and the streets are not well-lit, and the roads are usually empty also. I wonder how she doesn’t feel afraid to live there – my brave girl! But in any case, she shall soon be far safer, ensconced with me.

I do not wish to cause her alarm. I have the right dosage of a sedative to quickly apply to her one evening soon, as she turns the corner into her darkened home street. There is a convenient set of bushes at the corner where I can await our meeting, and I have checked this vantage point for its visibility by others and been satisfied it provides the requisite cover. She will barely know a moment’s fear before the drug soothes her. I do not wish to cause her distress.

Not yet at least, not in circumstances where it provides no pay off, no purchase in her soul for her ultimate refinement and betterment. That shall come later under controlled and careful conditions.

But at first I do not want to see fear in her lovely eyes, oh no! Just an understanding, a brief acknowledgement, a recognition that it is me, and then surrender.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved