Sometimes you find a book that makes you remember your old self. It is like an old friend whom you haven’t seen in years but who knows your deepest darkest fears and dreams. A friend who helps you remember your soul, who opens your heart and who makes you recall the pain of solitude and loneliness, but with pain comes healing.
She never felt attractive. In her mind, she was simply a wallflower, a friend who can be relied on to cover up when one went on a date with a boy. She longed to be like her friends, beautiful with distinctive expressive eyes that promised adventure and intrigue. She dreamed of having a boy look at her and think that she was sexy and dangerous. Instead, she had hazel eyes with a fаraway look and indistinctive hue of unruly brownish curly hair that never looked glossy or perfectly coiffed no matter how many times she brushed it. Her weight fluctuated between size 14 and 16, which would have been fine if she was 5’10”, but at 5”3”, it simply made her look childishly plump. Unlike most characters in the tardy Harlequinn Romance novels who had at least one striking feature which in the end attracted a gorgeous billionaire hunk, she had none.
The only positive thing anyone ever told her was that she was intelligent, but she never felt smart. She was awkward. There was no way she could ever come up with a fast comeback or a witty quote. Her comments were never on the mark. In retrospect, they were more foolish than intelligent, and there was always a retrospect. There was always a time at night in her lonely room the events of the day would come back to haunt and taunt her.
In every place she ever lived with her parents, her room was always small with a brown, beige sleeper loveseat, a small desk containing only bare writing essentials, a roller table with a boom box, and a book shelve with her favorite and school books. The only decorative item was a large poster of a red Lamborghini Cumtash that she got at a car show. She didn’t particularly care for cars, but this lonely poster somehow made her feel that she was cool. There were no other personal items. No whimsical figurines or cute pictures of any kind on bland beige walls. No photographs, not even a mirror. It was as if she would rather exist in her imaginary world than see herself as she was. To anyone visiting, providing she would even let them see her lair, it would have been obvious that this space belonged to a lonely girl. A child who spent her days in solitude, battling feelings of perpetual trepidation, loneliness, and self-flagellation.
In this plain room, memories of the day would come to remind her that she should have said this or pointed out that and not made herself laughable instead. Meager dates that she had were always one-off and then they were gone. She knew why. She wasn’t entertaining enough or dressed in the most flattering attire. She simply did not know how to be fashionable. She never knew how to speak or to flirt. She admired her friends who were comfortable in their own skin. Somehow they were never alone. While she always was.
The young girl dreamed of being bright, vivacious, with perfect hair, blazing spirit, and fearless, but somehow she remained in the background, a chaperone on a date pretending to have a good time while crying inside because she wanted to be the one the boys looked at in admiration and were seeking company, instead of an awkward girl who said the strangest things. Someone who would make a good friend to any male because they could tell her about the lady they liked and she would listen and tell them how to get all those pretty ones, but never her.
Her escape was her books and movies to stop loneliness. Not just any books, but books where women were strong and who found their place in the world. A spirited and daring sleuth or a spy. In her dreams, she went searching for spies and was fighting villains. She was saving 007. She was loved and admired. Sometimes the world of books crept into the real world and she wanted to tell her friends about the villain she helped capture, but she stopped herself just in time before everyone would think her mad too. So she would go once again to find her favorite book and lose herself in the pages where women were witty and beautiful and men fell all over themselves trying to reach them to prove their worth, and she dreamt that these women were her.
(to be continued…)