Just as she’s about to walk out of the bookstore, a vibrant book cover catches her eye. It’s a purchase she knows she shouldn’t make, money she knows she shouldn’t be spending, but by the time she’s read half-way down the back cover, she’s sold. She could do with a good love story in her life.
Just as she’s about to walk out of the bookstore, a vibrant book cover catches her eye. It’s a purchase she knows she shouldn’t make, money she knows she shouldn’t be spending, but by the time she’s read half-way down the back cover, she’s sold. She could do with a good love story in her life. Even if its fictional.
For a while, she finds herself swept up in a world where men are devilishly handsome, dashing and sweep you right off your feet. It’s the typical fairy tale love story. “Problem is, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life,” she thinks bitterly, as she throws the book she held so dear just a few weeks ago into a box. Maybe someone at the flea market will find it more useful than she did.
It’s a crisp Sunday morning in a city they can’t call their own but feels like home. Hand-in-hand, they slip in between market stalls, pause to smell a flower here, stop to enquire a price there. She often says he doesn’t pay her enough mind, but he doesn’t fail to notice the way her eyes linger just a little longer on the bold cover, on the ever-so-slightly dog-eared pages, on the tip of the right hand corner of the book that looks like maybe, just maybe, it was once stained with tears. They promised they wouldn’t spend any more money, said that they had already gone way over their holiday budget, but when she turns away to look at some earrings at the next stall, he buys her the book and slips it discreetly into her bag. “Romance,” he thinks to himself, “is not only about the things you take credit for”.
Her eyes light up in the exact same way as when she first found the book when she slides it over the table to her friend, smoothing down its more pronounced dog-ears in the same motion. “You’ve got to read it!” she says excitedly! “It’s so romantic!” That afternoon, over drinks with one of her oldest friends, is the last time she sees the book that has brought her so much joy. It travels thousands of kilometres, crosses two oceans and sits swollen and worn at the bottom of a box at the back of a cupboard. Years pass, love is made, arguments are had and life moves – on and swiftly so.
Almost two decades later, still unsteady hands dig the book out from under a collection of odds-and-ends. Sitting cross-legged on her bed in the warm sunshine streaming in the window, she watches the pretty pattern the swirling dust makes for a moment. Snapped out of her autumn afternoon reverie, she turns the book over in her hands. Gently – the cover hangs on by a thread. As she licks her finger to flip to the first page, she can’t help but wonder how many fingerprints litter the pages.
Just barely 16, her eyes are full of wonder and she’s hungry. Hungry for the story the book will tell and even more hungry for the one it can’t. The one it lived.
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