By Hadas
*inspired by The Number of People Who Meet on Airplanes by David Levithan
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We were reading the same book. I turned to her and pointed that out.
“Hello. My name is David. We’re reading the same book.”
She smiled. I told her “I love this book. Do you love it too?”
She nodded.
I thought that if I loved this book and she loved this book than maybe we could love each other. Maybe this shared love for this shared thing could exist between the lovers, even without the loved.
I asked her if she would like to join me for dinner.
She said yes.
I prepared the best meal I’d ever cooked in my life and bought the wine with the most foreign sounding name. She would ask “What wine is this?” and I would answer “Chateau Bonnet Entre-Deux-Mers” as if it were the name of my only child. I would ignore the fact that I’d named my only cat Bob. If she’d ask what it meant I’d say “Google Translate had no answer. If it’s beyond Google, it’s beyond our wildest dreams.”
She arrived. I wore my best suit and she wore her best dress. We sat face to face across the table. She’d brought her own copy of our shared love and she placed it beside mine. You couldn’t tell the difference between the two. We discussed the characters in the novel, the plot, the writing.
Eventually we moved to the living room. We sat side by side in armchairs, sipping our Google-defeater wine in small sips. I asked her what she thought about the fact that we both loved the book. She said her cousin loved it too. In fact, she had been the one to recommend it, after being given the book as a present from her boyfriend, who loved it as well.
I told her of my theory. If she loved it and I loved it then maybe we could love each other.
She told me I’d gotten the math wrong. If she loved it and it loved me then maybe that would work. But both of us loving it meant nothing. We both loved chocolates, and so did the serial killer convicted last week and so did her dog and her best friend’s brother. She told me that when she loved a book, she loved the writer – not the reader.
She said she had to go. She told me she’d had a lovely evening. Before she left she took a book from the table. She left without even telling me her last name. She didn’t know mine.
When I opened my book in bed I realized she’d taken the wrong copy. The bookmark wasn’t in the right place. It was at a page I had not reached yet. I wondered what would happen if I just started to read from that point, instead of returning to where I was and finding out what happened in between. I decided I’d just have to find her again and ask her to tell me what I’d missed.
I started writing the next morning. I spent the next year writing. I wrote every single day. The only breaks I took were for eating, showering, sleeping, and finishing our shared love.
When I was done I contacted a publisher. I found a small bookstore that agreed to support my debut novel and put it in the front window of their store. Surprisingly, the book picked up. I started getting calls, asking if I’d write another. I was emailed with a request to turn my book into a movie. One day I was asked to host a book signing at the bookstore that first took me in.
I sat in my chair and signed the books placed in front of me. Sometimes I didn’t even bother looking up. I scribbled my name over and over, until it barely meant anything at all.
The signing event was wrapping up. I’d already begun to cap my pen when suddenly another book was set in front of me. I was surprised; I had thought the last person really was last.
I looked up. The shock registered clearly on her face.
“It’s you,” she said simply.
“It’s me,” I replied.
“I loved it,” she said.
“I wrote it,” I said.
She understood.
I couldn’t wait to find out what I’d missed.
Tags: blog, love, my writing, short story, word, words, write, writing, writing blog
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