On Reading Love Stories

Perhaps with this foray into dating, my mind is elsewhere, but I'm finding a lot of beauty in life right now. Not specifically in my life, but in all the little occurrences: the cloud passing by, the stray rays of sun in the morning, the way the steam from my shower fogs up the bathroom mirror.

I also just finished re-reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. A lot of you may recognize it from the movie of the same title starring Elijah Wood. I respect both works for the mediums in which they portray the story and the limitations and openings available therein. Like the other Foer book I've read, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, EII was so touchingly sad and beautiful, in the same way that makes you want to simultaneously laugh and cry and – sit.

The way the three parallel narratives intertwine and converge is such a postmodern expression of form as means to convey content. Listening to my friend Ryan talk about it with my roommate the other day, I likened it in part to someone reading the box of letters I have from Emerson and reading them in chronological order. There's a certain kind of sense and themes that come up, but lacking the other half of the correspondence you're often left to fill in many of the blanks yourself.

I've also been reading Other People's Love Letters edited by Bill Shapiro, and I'm realizing that with a postmodern sense of textuality that encompasses all forms of communication, the idea of “letter” is a bit narrow and here has been expanded to include everything from notes on the back of a receipt to text messages, emails and what would traditionally be thought of as “love letters.”

The more I think about it and kind of combine these ideas in my head, the more I feel like almost all writing (or to be more broad, composing) is an act of love, or at least an act of passion, be that with a context of interest or emotion.

So often we pass playlists and mix CDs for our lovers. We post pictures and status updates and videos online in recognition of the people we care about. We feed them.

In many ways, I consider this blog a love letter to my journey through life. Just as acelessthan3 is so integral a part of who I am as a person and character, Widdershins is a keystone to who I am as a writer.

I'm teaching myself to appreciate the little things more because in the end, that's all we have regularly. Little things that make us smile.

I had an idea the other day to get a deck of cards and call it “54 Reasons.” On each card, I would write a different reason I had to smile and either randomly shuffle the cards and break them out as a mood booster, or give them away. I don't know if I'll actually follow through with this plan, but it's a loosely thought out idea somewhere nestled into the horizon.

I'm not sure how I feel about reading love stories, because the kind of love stories I like most are tragedies, are full of hope and sadness and fear. And they don't always have a happy ending.