Consider It

The way the mind processes events in one’s life fascinates me tonight. Imagine a library shelved with bindings of books titled after some of our most mundane interactions with the world around us. The Get Ready with Me filled with thousands of pages recording the same actions every single day like the sentence, “She brushes her hair for the three-thousandth time;” or The Encyclopedia of All the Information You Recall from 4^th Grade Social Studies; or even more interesting, an Anthology of Every Dream You’ve Ever Dreamt.

While each of those covers seem worth a good read in a coffee shop around the corner, none of them quite stand out to me as much as the Relationship Saga. This work contains records of every human interaction, those which are only a sentence and those which occupy entire books. For me, the books tend to have this categorical pull that intrigues me enough to open and turn its pages. I’m fully immersed in its writing, and live each day to decipher the next page. Its grammar, its imagery, exhumes my consciousness to truly experience something worthwhile.

Not to say that each chapter is especially riveting or action-packed, but that in reading, I can turn to chapter 3 and piece the story together with what’s in between the lines to make sense of it. It’s a treasure to have a text so detailed and extensive, that we can learn about ourselves in relation to entire other person, and that the continued interaction, if mutual, can create a book series of its own, that encapsulates the complexity and beauty and pain of a relationship.

Tonight, I reflect upon those paragraphs of pain. When I first read them, I was confused and distraught, ready to throw the book across my bedroom as if it were a Twilight novel, as if I were equally enraged with something as trivial as a Bella-werewolf-vampire love triangle. How could she not choose Jacob after all? It’s in those paragraphs, where I cannot find the words between the lines, where I cannot fit this piece into the overall story.

Often, we allow those kinds of paragraphs to manipulate how we read the story. Somehow the tear-drops that blur the next sentence seem to be the only thing we can read. And we associate the Relationship with that teardrop on the semi-colon. We toss the book to collect dust in the waste bin to never be read or understood ever again.

Little do we realize that that teardrop can trickle into and stain every other book in the Saga, into our mental collection, and we perceive our world through teardrops, blurred and undefined. All because we did not read to the end of the sentence.

This is not to say that every relationship is a book in the saga, but it is often more than a sentence, more than a paragraph.

I’d like to think we pick up the book and read to the end to find Edward and Bella and Jacob with everything they ever wanted, but often we have more books in the waste bin than we do on our shelves. I’d like to think that if we read each person to the end, we’d find that we are just like them—books with tears and tears that taint our stories, that deserve far worse than collecting dust. But each has their book in relation to another, each appears in a variety of stories, of sonnets, of epics, and of punctuations.

My point in writing this is not to prompt or to propose, but to simply pose this thought to maybe be considered by someone who needs to consider it—consider this book and its value to your library; consider the waste bin and what may have been lost; consider the teardrops and decipher the semi-colons—just consider it.