The Lovers' Language

I started reading my comfort series because I liked a boy. My first-grade classmate (who I would have an unfortunate crush on for the next seven years) introduced me to Calvin and Hobbes during one of our weekly class visits to the library. I was already an established bookworm, a fact which I was sure would endear my bookish beau to me, but I couldn’t help giving him a nudge in the right direction by picking up the comics he obligingly raved about when I forced him into conversation. My plan worked, more or less; my affection remained unrequited, but as we exchanged our favorite strips, a glimmer of intimacy blossomed between our first-grader bodies. Is that when I began to view books as a gesture of love? I would not know for many years how to tell a boy I liked him, but I could pick up a novel and pretend reading the same words as someone else meant we had a connection.

Between every line, I looked for what my apathetic admiree declined to give me. I soon realized I could find a closer substitute in romance: the genre of the loveless and the hopeful. Every time I collapsed on my bed after a long day of not talking to people and covering my stomach in gym class, I had a shelf of consolation prizes in which to escape. Stamped in ink were a thousand promises: I was not weird. I was not unloveable. I was unique. I was special. If magic were real, I would surely be the chosen one; and at any moment, a Prince Charming might trip into my life and fall at my beautiful feet. I vacillated between believing my true love would show up any second and believing I was doomed to be alone forever. All this while I was fourteen, of course. I call romance my favorite genre, but I wonder if I’ve outgrown the books like I outgrew my braces. I no longer look like the girl with too-short hair and poor style, yet she is inside me somewhere, clinging to her storybooks like a ward against loneliness.

More powerful than reading about love is writing about it. I discovered this power one summer while attending a theatre camp, and we students were split into groups and tasked with writing a play. As an actress, I should have been most excited for my moment in the spotlight, but I poured all my focus into commandeering my writing group’s scene. Finally, I no longer had to wait around for some other daydreamer to extol the virtues of a girl who sounded suspiciously like me; I could do it myself! I brought my characters to life with tyrannical precision: two teenagers reminiscing about the beginning of their love story and grappling with its end as college and the prospect of long distance approached. Who says the girl with seventeen years of experience in singledom can’t write a good love story? Not to brag, but my scene was a fan favorite. I’m sure no one noticed the female character happened to share my love for reading. I sure hope no one noticed the male character was inspired by my friend, who I was only slightly head over heels for at the time. No one was less surprised than me when our teacher cast him in the role. My only lament was that writers couldn’t be in their own scenes. I watched him play out the romance I had written with another girl, unaware it was all a love letter to him. If reading is, for me, a gesture of love, then writing is a plea for affection.

After that, my lover’s pen became insatiable. A poem dedicated to my school bus crush. A play inspired by my latest obsession. Verses upon verses lauding unrequited love, because pain turned into art is its own form of romance, isn’t it? All the while I wondered when someone would turn me into beautiful words.

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

My sister thinks it’s fitting that I met my boyfriend in my AP Literature class. “You seem like you only date smart people,” she said. I can’t deny we’re the perfect cliché: the pretty girl with her nose in a book and the boy who loves her like a poem. He has forced me to amend my definition of “true love,” that coveted deus ex machina threading through centuries of sonnets and ballads and secret correspondences. True love is not the all-powerful, once-in-a-lifetime magic we revere it to be. It is much simpler. We call true love “true” because it gives truth to the stories. Once upon a time, I wasn’t sure what I was writing about. Now, I read over my old work and I see: I was writing about him.