Today, I re-read "Perks of Being a Wallflower," 8 years after I first picked it up on my boyfriend's bookshelf while waiting for him to mow the lawn. And while I remember loving it and being overcome with it's sadness and wanting to just lie there upside-down on his bed with the summer sun warming me with the muffled roaring and grinding of the lawn mower outside - tonight, when Charlie signed off for the last time, I curled on into a ball on the floor of my apartment and just cried.
Stories like that one, whether in a book or a movie or a blog, make me remember the pain of first love and the confusion of growing up the naive oldest child of strict immigrant parents and the floating emptiness of being lonely and bored and I relate. The melancholy is beautiful; what cynics or people who don't want to remember those strange and uncomfortably large feelings for a single moment call disdainfully, "emo." I guess I've always been a pretty sensitive (some might say over-sensitive) person. Good stories just bring me to these depths, and then it takes time for me to climb back out. And as long as I'm not also concurrently suffering from my own darkness, I like it. It feels right and it feels real.
I really wanted to write more, but it seems like this small effort has taken out more from me than I anticipated. If you've read a good book or seen a good movie or heard a good story lately, I'd like to hear about it. For now, the evening will end with some My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and some forced cuddling with my best friend, Carter.
I'm adding that to my reading list -- the last book that made me cry was The Book Thief -- but maybe it was because I was staying at my parents house in my old teenage room and I felt super emotional about my life... hard to tell.
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