I lost count of the days at this very bad time.
I've read a lot of books in my life, very few love ones because I don't like them very much, I prefer good stories, tough, full-bodied, well-told, like I Maya by Eca de Queiros, a Portuguese author.
It came to me in a cardboard box along with a lot of other junk, the result of clearing out the basement of a house under renovation. I don't remember what year it was frankly, maybe late 80's or so. My family has always been 'poor', my father had a very modest job and a lot of hard work, he tried to make his fortune but with little success, in fact he earned more debts than anything else.
We couldn't afford much and my mother, in order not to make us lack study material, would do anything. Imagine my joy at having a new book in my hands that I could devour: hardcover, pages yellowed by time, mine. I really read it in record time, loving every word of it. The plot is very complex, like any family saga and has decidedly tragic implications, including suicides, death and incest, yet it is told so well as to make the reading a pleasant walk.
A book opens your mind, makes you dream, takes you on fantastic journeys all your own. I miss those times, I miss being able to have the concentration to dive into a story and let myself be transported inside the pictures that paint in your imagination. Sometimes my head wanders far away, it gets distracted, the thoughts crowd confused and chaotic, like subway commuters at rush hour, unknown even to myself.
I can't concentrate as much as I used to, to stop at the pleasure of reading. Things never go the way I want them to, I feel like I'm the victim of a bigger game that I don't know the rules of and that I just can't play, but mostly that I can't stop. They say that you have to be bold and believe that anything is possible in life, that you have to aim high if you really want to achieve your dreams, yet I wonder if instead it is not luck that decides in truth, like those beautiful and snobbish women who choose their lovers.
Or perhaps it is often our own chains, our own impediments, our own beliefs that keep us from taking flight. I look back and wonder where I left my enthusiasm, I seem to have lost it a long time ago, in the moment when I wanted to be like everyone else and instead had to settle and often had to give up. The same enthusiasm in discovering what was in a box full of discarded things, which came from a basement under renovation, arrived at the home of a dreamy girl, who gets attached to stories and who grew up to be a shadow.
I don't know if I want to be one or if I just got used to it, I know that sometimes I have to write it down, I have to make those chaotic thoughts palpable, because I don't want to get lost in the nothingness of a crowded world, without dreams and without hopes.
[©Yelena b.]
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