The Pleasure of Leaving

Paper Towns¹ is a story about a high school senior named Quentin Jacobsen (nickname: Q) who has been entranced by his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, since time immemorial. Margo Roth Spiegelman is spunky, mysterious, strikingly beautiful and very adventurous. It is easy for someone like Q to confuse his attraction to Margo's enigmatic personality for love and this is precisely what he does.

A few weeks before their high school graduation, Margo shows up in Q's bedroom and takes him on a night filled with adventure (mostly of the mischievous, revenge prank kind). Their little night-out ends with Margo and Q slow-dancing in SeaWorld (which they broke into in the dead of the night) and her whispering the words "I. Will. Miss. Hanging. Out. With. You." in his ear before they part. Expectedly, Margo Roth Spiegelman doesn't show up in school the next day.

When Margo stops showing up to class altogether, Q realizes that it isn't just one of Margo's random disappearing acts. He, together with friends Ben, Radar and Lacey, searches for clues that might lead them to Margo's whereabouts, clues that Q thinks Margo left for him to find.

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It took me an entire week to re-read this book that by Friday, it's beat-up and quite dirty. I'm a little bit sad about that but I'm extremely happy about the story and its pacing. I quite like it despite the fact that the characters in John Green's body of work are eerily similar to one another. One can easily find similarities in Quentin Jacobsen and Colin Singleton (An Abudance of Katherines) and in Margo Roth Spiegelman and Alaska Young (Looking for Alaska). Aside from that, the book is just great. It's very witty and spot on. I wasn't as articulate as Q or Ben or Radar when I was in high school and I sure as hell wasn't a Margo or a Lacey but I loved and understood the way they all connected.

I especially liked the fact that the book touched on the difference between the way we picture people and the way they really are. In page 282, John Green wrote, "What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person" and that's totally true. Q didn't really love Margo, he loved his own idea of who she is. We sometimes let ourselves build a castle out of what is essentially a straw house, not because of naïveté but because we all hope for the best, especially in affairs of the heart. Finding out that the person you've been pinning for is actually an asshole may be one of the worst feelings in the world. It's definitely not up there with civil war, nuclear holocaust and famine but heartbreak wise, it comes pretty close to complete spirit wreckage. We can always pick ourselves up from something like that but this book is a good reminder of saving one's self from self-destruction.

I also realized that John Green's novels are always about kids in search of an adventure or something, in general, whether it's to prove a relationship theorem, the Great Perhaps or Paper Towns. I don't know what other readers feel about that but I like it, it's a huge reason why I'm a fan of his writing. I like the hope that the search for something brings. I like the promise of the unknown. I like the pleasure of leaving.

"She'd told me: the pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it...

...She reads the Whitman and highlights 'I tramp a perpetual journey,' because that's the kind of thing she likes to imagine herself doing. The kind of thing she likes to plan.

But is it the kind of thing she likes to actually do? No. Because Margo knows the secret of leaving. The secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Ruling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

And so when she left, she left for good."

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¹Paper Towns are fictitious towns added in maps to serve as copyright traps.

We are indestructible but we are all going

"He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless"

John Green's Looking for Alaska moved me in the most unexpected way. I didn't feel strongly for the book in, say, the first half where I felt like I was simply reading about a bunch of gifted kids and their issues. I'll be quick to acknowledge that it is a fantastic book, yes, and that the characters were so well-explained, their quirks became very fascinating. But I thought it won't really be my book. I've had so many good reads in my reading life and some books end up just like that. Another good read. Very little books mean so much to me, I didn't realize Looking for Alaska will be one of them.

Things took a turn when I started reading the "after". I don't know how long it took me to finish reading but I did remember going over and over every page, trying my hardest to disconnect myself from the story. I couldn't. It spoke to me because I was also ridden with guilt, racked by what I should've done and what I didn't do. I'm nowhere near Alaska's self-destruction but like her, I don't speak of my pains or my regrets. Because when the person you could've saved is already dead, who is left to atone you? It isn't a secret that I'm still reeling from a death in my family but it's also a sort of open secret that I forced myself to carry on without much thought. I chose (and I still do) to get of the labyrinth of suffering the same way Alaska Young wanted to. Straight and fast. I thought building a wall between myself and my feelings and inevitably going after the next step made everything easier. I didn't leave any room for thinking, regret or blame. Unlike Pudge and the Colonel, I didn't want to look into the reason why my dad was POOF, gone. Because he already was and I know that what I will know about his last moments, his thoughts, his feelings will only hurt me more. I didn't want any pain. All I wanted was to get of the labyrinth. Straight and fast.

I can say many things about this book to explain just how poignant it is for people like me but this book will most likely be loved by anyone who reads it. Whether out of motivation from suddenly remembering that we are all going, the many Famous Last Words or the quintessential search for the Great Perhaps, I just know this book will be well-loved. I have faith in that. But in a nutshell, it was Pudge's final paper for Dr. Hyde's class that got me the most. And even though Pudge was writing about Alaska, I felt it was a letter from the universe, addressing questions I had but was too afraid to ask. This book was a godsend and I cannot be anymore pleased that I read it at the right time, this time.

" When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.

Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here's how I know:

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her--green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs--would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal, that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I will think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter and matter gets recycled.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else, entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere because it cannot be destroyed.

Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself--those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself--those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were: "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere and I hope it's beautiful. "

I may not get out of the labyrinth soon but in bringing me atonement, giving me back the hope I once had and reminding me that I am still indestructible beyond my belief, this book has already helped me get halfway through. It brought me a few steps further into closure, this story that I felt was written after my heart. Definitely, most definitely, this book is one of mine.

Hello, father. It was like reading a note from you. I hope it's beautiful out there.

The Beginning (of the Middle)

"Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? I mean, I've always felt like the Katherines dump me right when they start to see what I look like from the inside--well, except K-19. But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself--if they could live in my memories--would anyone, anyone love me?"

An Abundance of Katherines is the first John Green book I have read. I was in Chicago when I bought the book and what better way to commemorate Greater America than buying a book that starts in Chicago and ends somewhere near (Gutshot, Carver County, Tennessee)?¹. It is a book about a child prodigy-slash-Dumpee named Colin Singleton, writing the perfect theorem to prove his genius and make something out of his failed relationships. Nineteen (ALL!) of which (technically, eighteen, because K-1 and K-19 were one and the same) were with a Katherine, hence the title.

It's hard to write something about this book because I love it without a solid reason. I just like it because it reminds myself of myself, in some parts, and that's a pretty lame reason to use when writing about a book. I'd say this book is for everyone who, as a teenager, went through unexplainable longing and confusion (Aren't you glad we're way past that dramatic, angsty, very cranky stage?). It will remind you of your youth and assure you of how far you have come, now that you are old enough. If you are as young as Colin, you will know--by the end of this book--that you'll just have to carry on and look for something to hold on to because life doesn't stop when you're hurt, even if you want it to.

What I like about the book:

1. Lindsay Lee Wells whom I can sort of relate to, in terms of chameleoning in and out of personas whenever she's in the company of somebody. Not that I am as hot as her or anything, but I've always been the average semi-threatening-but-cannot-really-throttle-anybody-kind of underachiever. The kind of girl you mark as a threat in the beginning but cuts herself out of the competition halfway through. I hate it, but that's always been my signature move. (Huh? Yes.)

"I'm full of shit. I'm never myself. I've got a Southern accent around the oldsters; I'm a nerd for graphs and deep thoughts around you; I'm Miss Bubbly Pretty Princess with Colin. I'm nothing. The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets you to where nothing is real"

"...Things about you, and things about Colin, and things about Hassan and Katrina, are either true or they aren't true. Katrina is bubbly. Hassan is hilarious. But I'm not like that. I'm what I need to be at any moment to stay above the ground but below the radar.

The only sentences that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I feel most of the time.

2. I didn't really realize I was reading YA until I was halfway towards the end of the book and googling stuff about it. It turns out I am not alone in this sentiment.

3. The whole book is filled with nerdy footnotes and anagrams. I like footnotes, in general, because it helps me understand the text. I also love footnotes because it used to help me make better cheatsheets in high school. Anagrams, on the other hand, are word games I've always been fascinated with but never really bothered to be good at. So, past is past but I do love a good reminder of my failures in life.

4. Colin Singleton likes to sulk and read books, is fond of self-pitying his way throughout the day and is secretly as good with the ladies as he is with learning languages (He tries hard, I believe, and that's how you nail it). He gets annoying in the end (only because if I were a prodigy, I wouldn't even spend time thinking about boys. I will enroll in Northwestern straight-up and get a few philosophy classes running before September hits), but sympathy is hard to forsake if you have been a Colin Singleton once. (If you haven't, screw you. You missed out on... a lot of chocolates, some noodles and Kleenex consumerism). It's hard not to rally behind this boy because his problems, no matter how pathetic ("I do not matter") or stupid (End of Theorem: The future is unpredictable) they are, have been our problem once, too. Maybe not exactly, but we've all been there. We've all felt alone, confused, and very, very, very irrelevant.

5. Hassan, Colin's pudgy, Judge Judy loving best friend. I like sidekicks who steal the lead's thunder in stories, in any story. I found myself laughing at Hassan's lines, usually accompanied with Arabic words, and at the incongruency of his behavior and his religion. He also reminds me of myself, mostly because I am a fat kid with really horrible asthma attacks and I sometimes use that as an excuse to miss school. Really, no one can tell the difference.

If you are a somebody who's always looking for somebody else, if you are running after a past love or if you are STILL sulking about the loss of a seemingly perfect one, then this book is for you. It is for Dumpees mulling over (and consequently, if you are a bitter girl like me, finding painfully pathetic ways to declare your sadness--like blogging! Cheerio!) their constant stature, and for anybody who just wants somebody to love them back. I could tell you that this book has fantastic geekery only a certain people can relate to but in truth, and this is something we all know, it is for everyone because we all want to be wanted, Dumpers and Dumpees alike.

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¹In hindsight, it was a bad idea to leave Looking for Alaska lying on that shelf. Finding John Green books in Manila is just as hard (or even harder) as scoring a boyfriend who can discuss books about awkwardness and geekery with you.