“There is only happiness in life, to love and to be loved”is a quote I once read

while I was browsing through the internet. I remembered thinking how odd it was for
some people to depend on a superficial thing such as love to be a significant component
to make their lives complete and worth living. Some people say they would go to hell
and back just to feel the very essence of love and be loved. And I always wondered how
much they are willing to compromise and sacrifice just to fill the hole in their hearts.

It has been ten years since the townspeople, men and women, have seen both Miss
Emily Grierson and her old manservant-- a combined cook and a gardener until such
time they had to pay respects for a fallen monument., Miss Emily Grierson herself.

Apart from honouring Miss Emily’s wake, lot of people must’ve come to see the
stubborn and coquettish decay of the style of the seventies-- a house that used to
bother not only the mailman, the tax collectors but even the aldermen and the mayor,
who were the first people to see the inside of the house after she ceased to open the
doors ever since she departed with her father. They called a special meeting to adhere
the issue they had with Miss Emily’s taxes. The exterior and interior design they were all
intrigued about might have been what they expected from the Grierson’s, who held
themselves a little too high for what they really were. Just a little too high to convince
Miss Emily that she had no taxes to pay given that the ex-mayor, Colonel Sartoris, felt
sorry for her when her father died just a while after her mother, leaving her with nothing
else but the house. She became a pauper with a princess’ attitude but a Colonel who
insisted that no Negro woman should appear in the streets without an apron is bound to
help a fellow elite like a Grierson, like Miss Emily.

Miss Emily was not able to entertain men when she was at that age due to the
quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life. He had been too virulent,
too furious that until his death, the only man in Miss Emily’s life had only been him. She
became too attached to her father that even when everyone knew her father was dead,
she insisted for three days that he was not. Even when the ministry tried calling her, and
even when the doctors tried to persuade her, to let them dispose of the body. They even
had to resort to law and force until she broke down and allowed them to bury her father,
and so, quickly they did. Afraid that Miss Emily might go completely crazy the way her
great- aunt Wyat once was.

After her father’s death, she became sick for a long time. Later, the neighbor’s
saw her hair short that made her seem like an angel from the paintings in the church. It
was then that she met a foreman who worked for the construction company that was
paving the sidewalks. Homer Barron was a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and
eyes lighter than his face that also became the light of the town, especially to Emily’s
life. Soon after people in the town saw them on Sunday afternoons, gossips began.
Misplaced pity on Miss Emily’s part, thinking how she could go out with a day laborer, a
man that is not on her level. Other people supported her, her happiness, her sanity. They
even considered the possibility that the two might marry each other someday. But all the
gossips, be it negative or positive, came to a common conclusion-- Homer was into men!
It was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks Club. It was also known that
he was not a marrying type of man. This caused everyone eyes to focus on Miss Emily.
Right after she was seen to have bought an arsenic in a drugstore, everyone became
worried and contracted the ministry, claiming that if Miss Emily kills herself after realizing
w