Summation..

I believe that in life there are certain moments when real change takes place and that for me, that moment was meeting her. She was so intense, like every book I had ever read. She was everything I had ever written about. She was everything that was in my heart. When I looked at her I knew that a few minutes of our become; one experience made all the words in the books I had read come to life.

As a child I felt lonely at times, especially in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. But books saved me. They offered me companionship in the dark. I read my way through the classics and contemporary novels, poetry and everything in between. I even read gardening books, ostensibly to learn how to touch the green earth. However, I read even more to know things and come to conclusions.

I love books even more than I did when I was younger, and I thrill to characters with compelling humanity and complexity, whose challenges and struggles feel familiar and resonant to me. I hunger for stories that push my buttons, that challenge my thinking, and that forcibly widen my own perspective; stories that are raucous and tender, brutal and merciful, hopeful, probing and profound.

But, even as I turned pages upon pages and read and read, there was always something missing: some conversational chord I couldn’t quite strum, some nuance of reading from life to which I could never fully transition. And then She arrived in my purview, an imagined figure come to life, still carrying the aura of a bookish character, yet shining into existence with the strangely reflective realness of fiction.

There was something about her, something enigmatic, beautiful, that swept me off my feet the moment our eyes met; an Elizabeth Bennet tempered with a Jane Eyre’s determination, and injected with an Anna Karenina ardour, who, behind it all, was a woman, with her unknown dreams and fears, transformed into this modern day avatar who stood right infront of me.

We talked and talked, about philosophy and art and literature, much as the two characters in a certain novel talked; I don’t know if it would still be called pillow talk if it was on the futon; of this and that, as if it were being talked out of me, breathed out of her, our words and our bodies circling each other in a dance that was at once electrifying and irresistible, until now I could say almost anything, about human nature, or about a fine sentence, She being the conversation partner I had always longed for, I knew I would never find a better one, for almost the first time in my life someone was reading me in a way that would change the way I read myself, it was like reading a book about you, someone else wrote it but you could read your story in it.

But it wasn’t just as a thinker or even orator that I admired her. It was her life lived truly, which to me was so much like those heroines of the books I had grown to love. Courage came from a quiver of pains, not of boasting; she felt everything as she was living but did it anyway.

She reminded me of Scout Finch; of Hermione Granger; of Clarissa Dalloway, and I was fifteen when I began imagining her like her single, stereotypically ‘perfect’ self was all it took to make me feel less damaged, less lonely; to matter more.

And in this perception of her relation to me, She appeared as the fulfillment of all books and poems I had known; of all the great or wretched or absurd personages whom I had run to meet in them, or who had been thrust upon me by them; of all those pages where, defying space and time, I had savoured the romantic or tragic happiness of women; of all those tales, and there were millions of them in which, delighting in some shepherdess with her shepherd, I had left Earth to seek a resting place among the stars.
Our relationship hadn’t been free of difficulties and distance and the longing, sure, but it was also forever a source of wonder: a great novel with turnings and turbulences, rose and reckoning, by which we only got further convinced of the intimacy and importance of words together.

In her embrace, I found someone who thought about life ; about words, about everything around her, the exact way I did. We were on to something, She and I, we were writing a story, a page at a time. And as long as we had my precious tome, we were invincible.

Indeed, She wasn’t only a figure in my personal story: She was and has been the synthesis of a lifetime of reading, the sum total of the stories that had nourished me, those that had opened my heart to love and lit my mind’s eye to loss and made me yearn for redemption. I will pass that legacy on. It has blessed every page I have written, including this one. I will be forever indebted: to her and to literature for the grace gift of transformation.