Books and Boys

Beginning a new novel is like beginning a new relationship. You know that at some point it is going to end. Because let’s face it, this isn’t the last book you are ever going to open; this isn’t the book with which you will spend the remainder of your life curled up in an easy chair beside the fire or on the porch swing making the most of a summer’s day’s last teasing strands of light. For both, the ending sometimes comes as a great shock, suddenly, drastically, and tragically ending without so much as a goodbye or a proper denouement. The beginning is quite different. One might be hesitant or quite the opposite, one might jump in head first and find themselves wasting away the hours of the days of the weeks of their life absorbed in the story, be it the story unfolding between two people or that of an author and the reader. But books do not leave scars. And neither do relationships…that is if we aren’t willing to let them. From both books and relationships, one garners understanding and with this understanding comes a clandestine strength. The details of the stories held with in the confines of paperback bindings and time begin to fade, although subtly, but certain lessons, if you will, never cease to exist in the depths of our subconscious. There was a period in history where people feared books, burned them in fact. More recently, libraries and schools banned books. These insular minds feared what might happen if people gained a deeper insight that might be at times hard to swallow. We do not give the heart or the mind enough credit. I trust, however, that the closure of one book means the beginning of another. I trust that one day I’ll find a book so absolutely all-consuming that when I do lose myself in its story, I won’t even be aware that the lines between reality and the life I live inside my head have becoming completely skewed. I trust that I won’t even care. But here is the real clincher…I’ll be the author of this novel. And there is that.