Wednesdays with the Arts: Indie Life—To Marry the Mirror

I have said it before, but looking at all these pictures of married, engaged, or nearly engaged couples just makes me think again that people end up with people who look like them. I’m not talking ethnicity here, but there is something in the face that just makes them look alike, like maybe they were meant to belong together.

So what does this have to do with Indie Life? Oh, you know I can link almost anything to writing…okay, probably anything, but I don’t know for sure on that. Basically I think it comes down to the characters I write. My leading lady and man tend to have some things that look alike…not necessarily visually since they are only fictional characters in my mind, but psychologically.

Sometimes it’s a mirror image where the same traits can appear opposite. Like in Guarding Angel we have Ki and Angel. These are two hearts hurting from the same pain—the exact pain really, but they reflect their mental management of that pain differently. It looks alike in clear view, but in the mirror it’s kind of reversed. Angel is still dealing with the hurt and seeing Ki again after all these years rehashes things. It also makes her realize that she never truly got over him. It’s like she went through life on autopilot and things were moving along until she sees Ki again and her heart and mind remind her of what they had and how much she really did love him. She fights it with every fiber of her being.

Ki, on the other hand, sees Angel again and he sees it as his chance for redemption, his chance to finally have the woman he once loved and still loves. Instead of running from her he is pulling out all the stops hoping she’ll let him back in. He sees the opportunity to start over and do better. He doesn’t look at their shared past and see disaster looming; he sees promise and opportunity for a passionate life together.

Same picture, mirror image, and the two of them shall have to figure out how to merge the two images.

Guarding Angel, like all of my work, is multicultural. My leading man is South Korean-American and my leading lady is black. My leading man is loosely based on somebody—and when I say loosely I mean you could drive a fleet of trucks side by side through the hole, but he is still kind of a distorted mirror image of the guy. The guy in real life is not a physical mirror image of me which is why we’ll probably never end up together. I am still convinced people end up with people who look like them.

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