Loving Zelda, A Story of Change, Reluctantly Told

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He would spend half a minute talking and kidding with the buyer in front of him until he learned something he could use to write a personal note.

I remember one woman named Edna who had to be forty years older than Ethan, buying his latest book for John, her husband. Ethan asked, "Does John have a sense of humor? Dear John, Edna and I had a wonderful evening. Her company is delightful, all the more so after a few drinks I'm sure you know that. I want to thank you for trusting her with me. Oh, yeah, John, I hope you enjoy the book. Edna blushed and grinned and looked like she could have skipped away.

She showed the inscription to her friend and the two of them giggled like a couple of schoolgirls, looking back and, I swear to you, flirting with Ethan. He could have that kind of wonderful, disarming effect on the people who nervously came to meet the hard and much tested "shooter" for the United States Government, a man who thinly fictionalized his own career into big-arena thrillers. I told him often how much fun he was to work with, and how much I liked his writing, and that I saved all of it. So I guess that's why he sent the box to me.

Over the ten years since Ethan sailed away we've written and e-mailed back and forth as we worked on new books and movie projects. Occasionally and in my mind I saw these events taking place at lonely anchorages with no other people for hundreds of miles he would slip into hopeful melancholy and write about his enduring love for this woman who hurt him terribly, and his own mistakes he would always hope to undo. They were wonderfully sad writings that accepted his situation yet never abandoned the dream that they'd be together again, making those letters among the most inspired and honest things I ever got a chance to read.

They made me grieve for Ethan, even more than they made me want to track him down and force him to understand that it was over between them and long past time for him to move on — although I had no reason to believe in my ability to make that clear to him. The genesis of this book was the contents of the box I received so many years ago.

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Either directly or indirectly, the pages that follow chronicle Ethan's story, based on his request that I organize his letters and messages into some logical sequence. My intimacy with this project has unfortunately included me in the vaguest elements of a plot line, and while I never would have dreamed I'd include my own painful epiphany in this telling, not only does it now seem to make sense, it also seems essential and honest. In order to write their complicated story of loss I had to understand it, and to understand it required me to take incredible risks.

To keep my personal experience secret would have cheated both him and you, so I'm taking a deep breath as I expose to you the emotional corset in which I'd chosen to live. The selflessness of this writing is the hardest and best thing I've ever done, but through the terror and tears of my own honesty — an honesty I'm quite sure will make you hate me — I hope to shine their devotion onto you.

Love is like a mirror, Ethan wrote in one of his books years ago. All it can do is reflect the love you show. Your choice; it's always your choice. Reflecting Ethan's bold love required a similar courage from me, so please — and I've never pleaded before in my life — judge me gently as you read. Ethan's reckless and violent life, which I think most people would agree was self-destructive, always reminded me of Ernest Hemingway's, a writer adventurous who either disguised or expunged his past in his stories.

But Ethan's favorite author was actually F. He loved Fitzgerald's writing while at the same time admired the intense and difficult love between him and his wife, Zelda. I vaguely remember a long ago e-mail where Ethan wrote, "This day some years back Fitz lost his great and true love to a fire at the asylum. How could he write after that, and why would he bother? I never understood that the two writers were tortured by the same un-winnable challenge until I read Ethan's letters in the box.

He signed many of them Scotty or Fitz, and the more I learned about his own love the more I understood the significance. I think I'm safe in believing it was Ethan who nicknamed his partially crazy and totally wonderful lover Zelda, and so it seems appropriate to use that name for her as I write.

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I think both of them would like it. As anyone who follows the news is no doubt aware, six months before the date of this writing Ethan sailed out of Nassau, Bahamas and into the teeth of a Category Four hurricane. I got an email just before he left that said the weather was worsening and not to worry, that only a fool would venture out into those seas. I called the dock master as soon as they fixed the phone lines and learned that despite his promise to stay in port, Ethan left shortly after writing me.

I haven't heard from him since, and his boat, Waiting , hasn't shown up yet in any marina I've checked.

But I like to think he's still alive. Ethan's life is, or was, a quest for true love and a conscious rejection of all that's accepted so easily in its place. Finding that kind of love was something he had to have, a safe center in his erratic life, almost like the calm eye of a lethal hurricane. While most people seem content to settle for anything that comes close, Ethan never had a moment's doubt that perfect love was possible.

Even if it escaped him in the end — and at this point I'd be the last person on earth to say it did — he saw the years he and Zelda not only survived, but often flourished against incredible odds, as absolute proof of its existence. While working on this story, I've witnessed the amazing way their tragic yet inspired love touched dozens of their friends, and even people who met them only once. I think those people admired Ethan and Zelda because they needed a reason to continue their own faith in each other, and a more inspirational couple would be hard to find, perhaps even impossible.

Ethan would be proud to know that after all I've learned, I consider him an utter fool for love.

Perhaps we should all be so lucky. After the editor hired me to ghostwrite this story, I found myself miserably confused over how to best show the intensity, understanding, and passion the publisher wanted its readers to feel. Over the course of those months — and with lots of unappreciated interferences — I grudgingly began to understand that Ethan and Zelda came close, painfully close, to sharing life's most amazing experience, and just like spirituality, peace, or happiness, love was impossible to either see or prove. That created the dilemma that eventually led to this unusual telling: How could I even attempt to show something so mystical?

The best evidence I could hope to provide was the effect it had on the two of them, but I couldn't use either one as proof. I had the letters, sure, but I barely knew Zelda.

And Ethan, God, he was far too secretive about himself. Although he was constantly making small talk and jokes, he'd spent his life using casual words to build a wall to hide behind, convincing people that he'd said everything on his mind when quite the opposite was true. On the few occasions when that didn't work and someone kept pressing him for details, he totally avoided self-exposure with a line that's been famous among his friends for years: This book became my crash course in the unfortunate ways that kind of self-protection and fear can conspire to make love impossible.

Distances of the Heart, a legend of zelda fanfic | FanFiction

I learned more working on this project than I have in twenty-seven years of denial and enumerable tries at therapy. Maybe it was nothing more than lucky timing, or because I was given no choice but to learn — the pressure to write requiring me to examine things I would normally choose to overlook. Or maybe, just maybe, Ethan and Zelda gave me an unseen helping hand, an emotional crib sheet of what they'd learned through such a difficult relationship. I don't know, really, but as you'll discover in your reading I'm far different now from the person who wrote the next chapter — what was originally, in a much different form, the opening chapter for this book.

I've finally managed to understand Ethan and Zelda's love for myself, and have reluctantly decided that the only way I could show it to you was through their effect on me. That required me to expose the bitter way I lived at the very beginning of this project that's now, thank God, at an end. It's shameful, sad, and perhaps even interesting to see how unhappy I was, especially since I didn't even realize it. As I'm sure you can imagine, I'm nervous as hell about this.

This is story about maintaining your own sanity as you love someone with bi-polar disorder. The lovers both reach heights of love and depths of dispair until you wonder if there's any chance they can survive the intensity of their relationship. Lots of topics for interesting discussion.

Member: WesDeMott

I asked a friend to read it just so I'd have someone with whom to discuss it. Totally unlike the other books by DeMott. Only his smooth writing and surprise endings let you know it's the same author of the political thrillers. Like taking a milion threads and creating a tapestry.

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