On Love

I still remember the first time I fell in love.

It was a gloomy Monday morning and I was but eleven years of age. I was feeling a little under the weather, and after pleading with my mother to let me stay home, insisting that I had a fever that would surely kill me if she sent me to school, and even after she put the back of her hand to my forehead and raised an eyebrow at me in amusement, she granted me a "flop" day and I was allowed to stay home. I snuggled under the sheets in my parent's huge bed and watched the morning cartoons. But after they ended, I started feeling bored, and it was still early in the day. I shall read then, I thought to myself. Seeing as I was still very young, my book collection did not expand beyond The Boxcar Children Mysteries, which I was very fond of, and the Goosebumps series, which I had already read enough times to know the text by heart. I resorted to moping around the house, searching for my school bag to start my school reading, which was to be from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. I took the book back to my parent's room and crawled back into my cave of blankets and comforters.

At first, I only looked at the cover. I was quite sure who ever had made the cover had a big box of 64 count Crayola crayons sitting on his desk, and he chose Sea Green for the cover. Ah, Sea Green! One of the prettiest crayons in the box, but it could not be used anywhere! I remembered how I would hold the crayon in my left hand, sometimes for so long that the paper had started getting damp from my sweaty palms, and I waited for the right time to use the pretty Sea Green color, but the time never came. One could not, after all, color the sky or the grass or the forest Sea Green!

But this! This must be what Sea Green was made for; the cover of The Secret Garden. I cracked open my new book and began reading it, and I immediately fell in love. I fell in love with the writing style I was not accustomed to, I fell in love with the setting that I had never heard about (I even remember pulling out a picture Dictionary to look up the word 'moor', for we did not have a computer at the time, nor did we know about Google). I was so engrossed in the story line, and I felt that I knew the characters intimately, almost like I was reading an old story about a friend I had lost touch with.

I finished the novel in one sitting, and I read it again with the class in assigned readings, at a pace of one or two chapters a night.

I experienced love-at-first-sight that very summer. I was at the library one afternoon, strolling the young adult sections, when I spotted another green book and remembered my first love, The Secret Garden. This book, however, was as thick as my wrist, but I pulled it off the shelf and looked at the cover anyway. It was titled Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I stared at the cover some more, letting my eyes take in the expression of the dark-haired speckled boy, and ended up checking the book out. I poured over its pages for hours, and I took it with me to school the next day and continued reading it after I ate my lunch. I remember it being slightly confusing, but it was wonderful. It was about dragons, and witches and wizards, and magic; it was everything my active eleven-year-old imagination craved.

We left for Egypt the following year, and I longed for a library. We had two school-reading novels for the entire year, and I finished both of them rather quickly. I remember one of them, The Prisoner of Zelda, fondly, for I had read that one three times and thought it was quite clever. Then one day a Pakistani girl in my class who was also from the U.S. (as were many of my classmates) told me she'd trade me one of her books for the book in my hand (I was sitting on the school bus reading one of my favorite Boxcar Children books). I agreed, and the next day she gave me a book, Sweet Valley Junior High: Twin Switch. I looked at the cover and remembered The Secret Garden and Harry Potter and how "normal" the cover of the book in my hand was in comparison. But beggars can't be choosers, and I was hungry for a read.

The book was so unsatisfying, nothing like the ones I had read, but when my Pakistani friend offered to trade more of her books for mine, I agreed nonetheless. And so it came to be that my beloved Boxcar Children Mysteries and Bailey School Kids and Nancy Drew and my two Joey Pigza books were replaced with Sweet Valley Junior High and Sweet Valley High School books.

My Pakistani friend, on the other hand, told me day in and day out how much she loved my books, and she would often sit with me during lunch for the sole purpose of discussing a particular character, an interpretation of a certain scene, or just bonding over our books. I remember asking her if she had ever read The Secret Garden, and she said she hadn't, and did I have it? "No," I lied. I did have the book, but it was the only book I was not willing to part with; I couldn't, I wouldn't, trade my first love for a book about a beautiful blonde teenage girl who has a crush on an equally beautiful teenage boy. I asked her about Harry Potter, and she was familiar with the name. I told her about the one book that I read, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and she frowned. "Why are you reading them out of order?" she asked, and that was when I found out about the series.

Eight grade found me back in the States, and this time, I started taking my literature text book home. I was introduced to Greek Mythology, and I checked out Adele Geras's golden-covered Troy. It was the first book to make me cry.

Later on, I read The Case of the Speckled Band in my ninth grade literature text book and I fell in love with Sherlock Holmes. He was my role model, as were The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew. I read an excerpt of Charles Dicken's Great Expectations the same year, and I went on to reading the entire novel, followed by his A Christmas Carol.

And that's when my love for the classics blossomed. I read into Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Daniel Defoe, oh the list goes on and on!

I've been in different types of love, but quite honestly, I can say that the love I have for books is my favorite type of love.