I was always the girl growing up who just wasn’t quite like the rest of them. I liked working hard. I liked contorting my body until I could feel the ache inside my bones, until I could feel the pain in my teeth. I liked to wear lipstick and nothing else and found myself fascinated with the shape of my lips and the different colors I could make them. I ate too little. Slept too much. Masturbated far too often and at far too young an age. I enjoyed the feeling of being naked alone behind closed doors, exploring my deepest secrets within my imagination, as I put my hand over the rapid pace of my heart to feel how nervous it made me. I blushed at the faintest mention of my name and almost perished when complimented. I loved to find the answers behind someone’s eyes. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of when someone REALLY looks at you. And I read. Every chance I got. Guess I haven't changed very much. I loved to read, especially from about ten years old. Books I shouldn’t have been reading. Books I didn’t quite understand at the time, books and plays in high school that made sense to me only on a purely emotional level: Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Romeo and Juliet, The Awakening, The English Patient. Like my childhood books, of course the infamous Judy Blume and Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, I didn’t realize that I didn’t quite understand them. And yet, I did. I understood them in that one moment of living. I was the girl crying to Mariah Carey as my sophomore boyfriend moved out of state, abandoning me at thirteen who thought she’d never recover. I was that eighteen year old in love with my very own Heathcliff for seven years. I was the leery girl, afraid to jump into that headlong lust that beckoned me only months ago. But when I read and reread such books or plays or stories I loved and couldn’t quite even understand why I loved them at the time, I see myself in them again. I see a different self. I see my niece and my students. I see the older characters in the book. I see the passion and the lust in Romeo and Juliet, the idea of what it means to go against what is expected of me. I don’t see Kate Chopin’s protagonist as a selfish woman anymore as I did in high school. I see and feel exactly why she walked into that ocean to take her life. For to live an unfulfilled life and then perhaps find someone that might actually take away the mundane, preordained, mapped out societal bullshit but not be able to act on it? I get it all so differently now. A student in my class asked me the other day why we still read Shakespeare, that it didn’t make sense to him in high school. What should have been a simple answer, turned into a passionate discussion of what makes a work of literature last. After class, the student looked at me and said, perhaps I should go back and reread it? And I answered, emphatically, “Yes. Perhaps you should.”
23 Comments
S.D.
4/10/2016 10:01:46
It is true what you write here. I am like that with movies too. I watched an old movie the other night that will date me. No Way Out it is called. What a different perspective I have now. I can see the clues that I never saw. I also get lies much more too. For my book like that it is any Stenibeck.
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Tori Dean
4/10/2016 10:14:36
Well done!! I think the older we get, interest and likes changes. I for one appreciate more of the passionate things than I did when I was younger. I hated school. Not popular to want to learn or understand. Now people come into my life that breathe this stuff that makes it worth what was taught back then.
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:09:49
It's great to know that even though you hated school, you have still become a writer! I secretly loved school. ;)
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Leslie
4/10/2016 10:19:36
So true, Rb! I think this is what makes us readers. finding ourselves at different times in our lives. The Awakening is also a fav of mine. Thanksyou
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4/10/2016 11:42:56
Lovely, RB. Once again, you've managed to tap into my memories and release a floodgate of emotions. Like you, the age of 10 was my year of exploration and discovery, literature, the compulsion to write, the sweet and sometimes scary response of my body to my touch. Ironically, very little has changed. I'll have to ponder that.
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:11:15
"...the sweet and sometimes scary response...to touch". Yup. I feel you, sista! Perhaps it marks the beginning of why we write what we write.
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So true. We may feel connected to something on a base level, but the way we see it changes as our perspective on life is influenced by new people and new experiences, causing us to see things in a different light.
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:12:03
Yes. And there's just so much more to learn. Every day...
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Mandi
4/10/2016 14:30:15
Well done RB! It's so true. As we get older and our emotions develop, the things that we have taken from reading books in our younger days, change as we rediscover the words as we reread those books. However, in my case, I tend to feel the emotions on a deeper level and still love them.
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:12:46
Agreed! It's all about emotions for me or I wouldn't read at all!
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4/10/2016 15:19:43
Such a lovely and personal post! Many thanks for sharing. :)
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:13:31
Isn't that such and amazingly brave tale!
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Dee
4/10/2016 17:40:22
Life is so complicated and how it develops, modifies itself and becomes something new every day. I never read, never wrote, never dreamed of romance beyond sensual passion that was a vanilla milkshake hand wrung from my cock when i masturbated. Love, sex were unknown to me till almost an adult. While I moved further and further into a technical profession I drew further and further away from any leisure reading and fewer thoughts of actually writing something.
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:15:10
You're an amazing writer. (I am both blushing and touched. Wait--isn't that what the beginning of this blog said? ! Go back and read that, you clever man.)
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:15:52
And what exactly did you know too much of? Do share. ;)
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Aiden Darke
4/10/2016 18:48:13
I started reading adult books at a young age, and learned a lot of the ways of the world, at least as told in the pages of fiction.
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R.B.
4/13/2016 07:16:29
Thank you, Maya.
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4/15/2016 04:51:58
Eloquent post. I can relate to it on every level. Beautiful job.
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Christine Bailey
9/5/2016 02:35:54
It's lovely to capture a insight of you, RB. I have always loved reading from a young age. For myself, it is more about the words of music that capture my heart. Thank you for sharing xoxo
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12/12/2019 11:02:36
I am probably in the last generation for whom books were the only escape when growing up. No television, the movies were too far away, no foreign travel - but books were a way we could experience a whole different way of life - something totally outside our normal existence. I didn't just read about the big wide world outside my restricted childhood, I actually lived it for a while. I haven't re-read those books since then, but I'm sure I would feel differently about them from the other end of life.
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I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
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