Hope..

It was a place at the centre of clamour, at the core of noise where the clamour and noise of everything else disappeared, a place we might call a space; a space we shared with our love of literature, a place of thought and intellectual interaction. This was our place of commonality ; our space where we were together in our love of literature.

Side by side, I was launched into a literary realm ; a world of flight and discovery thanks to the woman who was my companion, my muse. With her, I embarked on a series of imaginary journeys to distant places. It was not simply a question of rendezvous, a meet up; but of a displacement, as I literally found myself stranded in the narratives of an infinite number of works.

Her piercing insight felt like a kind of signalling; what came down to me from her were not just the characters that she dissected or the various meanings she extracted from a complex plot, but fires. Her eyes would widen as she spoke of a particularly devastating passage or the terrible grace of a scene. They spewed with the fervour and ardour of literary passion.

I remember the pauses, the preparatory untying and retying of her hair, that little exhalation before a new book was revealed. We read, together, the authors now canonised: the structure of their stories, the development of intent and emotion of their fictional characters, the rhymes, the repetitions.

I found in her a friend who mirrored myself: who loved literature as much as I, who thirsted to interrogate it, and with whom I created a world that was and is our own sanctuary from the cacophony of the world, where the discussion of books and the arts are the antidote to anxious minds.

Our evening meetups over a drink became my counselling sessions, respites from the draining swirl of daily affairs. In her company, she became my island, my refuge from the rush of the city outdoors. The thickly populated avenues of the metro now serve as bitter markers of her absence, of the stillness she brought into my life.

But now, as I read book after book, it is with a clear sense of purpose, to add so much to our next night’s discussion, hoping there will always be enough material for me to talk about, wanting to read as long as possible, until finally I can lay my head down next to hers, exhausted, and let the world around us disappear into darkness.

I am in awe of her, and of course, grateful beyond words at the chance to hear her expound on a novel I adored, and more than a little reliant on our occasional harmony. I look forward to the next such meeting already, taking some little comfort in the thought that they will continue, in her world as in mine, resetting the world, fuelling our intellects and imaginations, long after this one is gone.