Is It Inappropriate To Hate Your Novel On Your First Day?

Things got off to a rocky start. This Alejandro character that I decided to add is really fucking with me--I wrote about him all day today/yesterday, and he made me sad. Here's a taste of just how big a clusterfuck things are so far.

Sam, Jill, Scott and I are at Scott's cottage, so I will comment on blogs/be better on Sunday. Hope that everyone else is doing well!

She despised the fact that she couldn’t control her thoughts, or that same destination where they inevitably wandered. It was him, every time: Alejandro Puyol. The man—and his love—that she had run away from.
Despite every wish that she had, she could remember everything about him: his long and Tarzan-like hair, that curled and swirled like an angry tornado that was about to carry all of your livestock to your neighbour’s field. His eyes, they had always felt like fire to her. They were blue, like the ocean that rocked the shores of Alejandro Selkirk Island in Chile, his birthplace and his namesake. Maybe it is foolish to describe the features of someone as both fiery and watery, but if you had had questioned her about it, she wouldn’t have particularly cared. Love isn’t rational or reasonable. It’s all about mixed metaphors and bad poetry.
What she remembered most about him—regrettably, since she did not want to engage in objectification—was the gloriousness that was his physique. That was how why met, anyhow, and there was little point in denying something that was so obvious to anyone who could see their relationship for what it was. He didn’t look that way by a lucky accident; it was hours on the football pitch, running, kicking, tackling, and defending the goal as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered. Before he met Olivia, on most days, it was.
It was from that moment when their eyes met across the crowded room; and is there anything more clichéd than that? It was a crowded room in the salsa-dancing club—Copacabana, was it?—where Olivia’s friends had dragged her, and where Alejandro had dragged his friends. This is where everything began. They could name the moment where their bodies had felt so connected and destined to, well, connect.
It wasn’t exactly his eyes, although they surely helped. Their bodies met; she wasn’t exactly sure how, but is that the point? They were on the floor, swaying to the powerful and overbearing beat, when they collided. You know how it is—was it magnetism? Hypnotism? Withcraft? Regardless, it wasn’t just their bodies that collided; it was their whole lives.
Either way, from that moment, she could barely remember her life before she knew his name.
Alejandro.
It was the way that he touched her arm, as they danced to an Enrique Iglesias song; it was like he had never been more sure of anything in the world, other than the urgency of this encounter. She knew, he knew, then and there; and is there really anything more? Neither of them would have thought so.
As she thought this (instead of thinking about luggage, naturally), she tried not think about all of the conspiracy theories regarding crack cocaine and the Republican Party of the 1980s. She was successful, as it had no relevance to this discussion. Even though it didn’t make any sense, she welcomed the intrusion. It was more welcome than Alejandro. Almost every possible thing she could have faced would have been better for her than Alejandro.
Indeed, if she had to come up with one metaphor for Alejandro, it was that he was hot like Mexico. Or was it a simile? She had never excelled at retaining the specifics of poetry mechanics such as these, which was particularly embarrassing because she had an English degree. He was hot both figuratively (in a signature caveman way) and literally (his body had always felt a little warmer than hers, but it wasn’t exactly a shock to her; she teeth could always chatter when no one else had even begun to feel cold). His temper was fiery, and often in danger of boiling over. You see, for Alejandro, everything that happened to him seemed to affect him more than it would others. He just felt more. His heart was heavy and imposing, but he was far from the only one who could feel the effects.
Hot like Mexico, indeed. It was the perfect simile, she concluded.
Olivia had never known anything like him, and for the year and a half that they had almost become one person, she had never quite figured him out. Unlike Alejandro, Olivia’s essence was that of the Canadian weather landscape; varied, being the key word. At times she was so cold that her heart felt frozen. At other times, she was scorching and sizzling, rivalling Alejandro in passion and heat. No two days were ever the same for Olivia, and it was one thing that he had found exciting. That is, until her storm blew through his life and seemed to leave only wreckage behind. She couldn’t look behind her to see what she had done; she just had to keep moving, to put as many kilometres as possible between her and the devastation that her actions had caused.
You will never tolerate the Mexican heat if you are a Canadian winter.
The simile was right, but Alejandro was not. His overpowering curls, his simultaneously fiery and watery blue eyes, and his legs that could have taken on the world—they didn’t, or couldn’t, orbit in the same sphere as Olivia; it didn’t matter how hard they had tried.
Their love was sudden, even if it wasn’t exactly what either of them were wanting or expecting. But their love wasn’t based on want or expectation; from the moment that they met, it was about need. It was a need that neither of them knew that they had, but regardless, it was there. It was there in every interaction that they had, from that night in Copacabana to Olivia’s last night in Canada. She hadn’t the heart to tell him about her job at Globetrotting Gurlz until three days before she had left. Of course she felt guilty; it was a gnawing and enveloping guilt that often worried would consume her whole.
“I know that you may love me,” she remembered saying as they said goodbye. Olivia did not know exactly why she added the “may.” But just as some people are built to give love and be loved, others are the opposite; when it comes to being the recipient, they just aren’t up to the task. “But I just can’t be with you like this, anymore,” his eyes dropped to the ground as his heard did the same. The final bullet was when she repeated his name, to emphasize the gravity of her words.
“Alejandro.”
It was the end, for them. She spoke those words with conviction, as if she knew what she was doing. Of course, she didn’t. She never does, and she never did. But for some reason, when she said goodbye, and when she explained why she needed to leave, she had to project a kind of confidence in herself that she had never been sure that was there.
Yes, she hated herself for what she had done to a person that she had truly and deeply loved. But perhaps what she hated the most was the feeling she had as she sat in her cubicle, looking out onto the streets of London, England. That feeling wasn’t the regret that she had expected to feel; rather, it was freedom. She had escaped.
In those days three months ago when they had worried that she was pregnant, she knew that Alejandro would have married her if they had found out that she was. There was a long time in her life when she would have thought that this knowledge would make her feel loved and secure. But since we know how their story ends, it almost goes without saying that she did not feel happy at the possibility of having her life laid out for her like that. On those nights where she couldn’t sleep, she would look at Alejandro’s peaceful sleeping features and wonder to herself, “Is this it?” Some people wait for their entire lives to find those things that Olivia had stumbled upon so early; she should have felt blessed, right?
Instead, she felt suffocated. She saw what her life could be like if she would just succumb to inertia and let it wash over her. Alejandro, her dutiful husband and the father of her children, coming home from a day in the office and kissing her like he had just returned from an extended voyage across the sea. Teaching their children the intricacies of the beautiful game, never losing patience. He would love her, always, even when she couldn’t find a way to love herself.
She wanted to want it more than anything, but every part of her knew that she didn’t. From that moment, every thought that she had was occupied with plans of her getaway.
She hated herself for the fact that she could devastate someone and not really feel a thing. She didn’t think that she deserved to feel good, or to receive this gift of a new beginning.