When I was a boy, I was a sucker for girls with books.
So nowadays I’m used to coming across books in my library with inscriptions in them — dusty words from ghosts.
A little while ago, when I picked one up, I remembered reading it in Z’s apartment. The loneliness of her world made bearable by the words she’d given me, bound in a wood spine. The story was like a prayer Z wanted me to know.
Z was not nice to me, ultimately — though I’m sure she felt the same about me.
But one thing’s for sure, the world she put in my hands — and that I poured into my mind while sitting on a purple couch as she slept alone in a room not more than 10 feet away — that world still lives in me. And sometimes I think that that whole relationship was worth it just to get that.
It was about the heart and love and the world that tried to leash these powers down and keep them under control. And the tragedy that so often follows such restrictions.
It was called “The God of Small Things” but there was nothing small about it at all.
