MersPers

Often I forget why I love to read. I forget why there is an actual pulling, violent, crazy, heart-breaking, tragic, loving, and beautiful need to read. I forget and I doubt myself and I don’t know who I am and why I’m here, and for that matter why I’m an English major, and why the hell do I do anything in life if I don’t read. I have books and they sit on my shelf and I stare at them and I try to remember why I bought them and I can’t find the energy in me to pick them up and devour them and make them tell me secrets that no one else will. I’ve been like this lately. I don’t want to read or write or think and I just wonder if everything was a mistake. If I overestimated my “like” as a “love.”

But I haven’t. I know I haven’t because every once in a while I pick up a book. Sometimes it’s one I’ve read a million times, or one I read once years ago and I don’t even remember what it’s about, but I remember loving it. Or sometimes it’s a book that I preordered because it’s by an author who has written other books that stirred something in me and also because he promised to sign it. And he did, in green sharpie.

And I read that book. I choked it down like medicine I knew I needed and I felt it burn down my throat. And it made me think about life and death and nothing at all and maybe about oblivion and finality and what I am scared of, which is being wrong, and what I love, which is people, and what I am, which I still am unsure of.

When I had finished I flipped to the last few pages, because I believe in turning every page of a book, and I read the acknowledgments. And I saw myself in the word “Nerdfighters” and I saw others listed and I saw the name of a girl who the book was written to. I remembered two summers ago, I was in Boston with my family and walking with my sister through the rain-drenched marketplace and I can’t remember which of us found out first, but one of us told the other that twitter was saying that Esther Earl had died. And I remember feeling sort of helpless because I couldn’t remember her because I hadn’t really known her. I’ve always had this problem where I know I should be sad, but I’m not. I can cry over the smallest things and I can cry when I’m angry, but when I should be sad I am not. And every time I fake it. So I was quiet with my sister for a bit and tried to pull up some feelings for this girl who I knew meant so much to other people and then I gave up and went on my way through Boston, wondering why the earth didn’t pause for a second and explain to me this girl so I could remember her as she deserved to be remembered.

I feel like John Green has given me that. He stopped the earth for a moment and explained death and living to me. He told me all about Esther and told me all about everyone else. The general “everyone else.” The everyone who has died and those who have not but will, and he told me it’s okay. And he told me about suffering and its inevitability, and about how broccoli does not affect the taste of chocolate (but both exist, which I think is important), and about writing and about grand gestures and small ones and reading and how to live with the fault in our stars.