New Moon

I finished New Moon and boy does it pack all the emotions in the spectrum into those 500+ pages. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that was more tense, except possibly Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which had me on the edge of my seat for the entire 22 hours or so it took me to read it. (I tried to stretch it out but I just had to know the end.) The twists and turns and the heartrending inaction of the second book of the Twilight series almost puts Harry Potter to shame. Almost.

In the second book, all your favorite characters are back and it seems almost like a kind of peaceful existence has settled on the life of Bella Swan, our enigmatic main character. Right, because that’s why the book is over 500 pages long. The magic of this story is that it leaves you feeling like the main character, torn in two, searching endlessly to make herself whole.

It’s a story about love, far more than the first book. It shows how love can break a person and make them whole; more importantly, it shows how every new chance at love can weave back the threads of a broken heart. I was moved, angry, annoyed, frustrated and eventually bowled over by the passion and love in this book. I could not put it down for the simple reason that I had to know what was going to happen. I had to heal my broken heart along with Bella’s. This is a story in tandem: the character’s and yours.

 

Twilight…

I just finished reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. I was drawn to the book by the movie trailer of the forthcoming movie based on the book. The male lead in the movie is played by the absolutely gorgeous Robert Pattinson who played Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter films. 

Anyway, I ordered the book at my local library and I picked it up on Friday, not really expecting to find anything interesting. The book is AMAZING. I couldn’t put it down. Even though it was almost 500 pages I finished it in the middle of Saturday night because I couldn’t put the book down. Literally. I barely left the apartment all day because the book was so all-engrossing. 

I’m constantly amazed by how a good book can completely take you out of your world. I’m a voracious reader. I consider it sacrilegious to leave the house without a book and I sometimes even bring hefty tomes to the gym to read while I’m burning calories. 

Twilight won’t (can’t!) fail to impress you. It’s a love story but not kitschy, a fantasy but only in setting, a novel of choices and decisions that seem so important when one is young. And let me just say…the male lead is heartrendingly wonderful. He is beautiful and wonderful — the man who seems your beauty even when you can’t. He’s also a hopeless romantic. 

What I loved most about the book was the way it pulled me in. Within a hundred pages I wanted to know what would happen to this misfit young girl who is inexplicable drawn to the handsome but distant man. Who in the world hasn’t felt like an outsider at some point in their lives? I know I have. And so to watch a girl who is obviously more fabulous and deep than any of the other “popular” kids wind her way through love and death and life-wrenching choices is so much more pivotal than listening to people bitch about love and sex and hatred and evil. There is love in every word of Twilight, this was a novel written by someone who truly adored her characters. 

If you’re skeptical, that’s fine. Pretty much any public library should have a copy of this book on hand. Skip down and peruse at your leisure. Prepare to be dazzled. 

 

I want this…

I want everything and nothing. I want to be with you forever. I don’t even know who you are or how we fit, how we work. I just know that there’s an infinite destiny of ways in which we are perfect. I used to think that there was this one amazing person out there who was exactly what I wanted. I could see his face in my mind; I could write his history in my memory. 

And now, I have no clue. I don’t know what I want or who I am. All I know is that imperfection is a gift and that when I find you that I may be able to find peace. Because we are all imperfect. We all have faults and things that make us beings of doubt. But we are perfect in our imperfections. 

I don’t know the road to where you are. I especially don’t know where it will lead me. I have grand plans for my life. I know I want to live a life of prestige and purpose. I don’t want to fade into the background. I want to be somebody who mattered. But what if that is nothing like the life I am destined for? What if my life is simply meant to be the mother of our children? How do I reconcile that to who I am? 

I am more than anything a creative being. I think in prose and muse in poetry. I see the world in a million different ways and I am passionate for what I want and resolute about what I deserve. I know that love is something that finds you when you least expect it and can leave stranded on a desert island of your own misery. 

The pursuit of love is to constantly be standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing that the only way to fly is to jump. And so you jump. Sometimes you fall. You break a bone, or two, or ten. And then you heal. Slowly but surely. You become a different person who stood on that cliff the last time. And then you jump again. And again. I will jump until I find you. I will jump until I fly.