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I can’t read you.
When I was five my nursery teacher called my mother and told her that they were concerned as I did not appear to be able to read at all. Two weeks later, I read an entire children’s book aloud to my nursery class peers while the teacher looked on, dropped jaw open wide.
I needed to be perfect, needed to be sure everything was right.
I can remember my grandmother reading me Peter Rabbit, my mother reading me Thomas the Tank Engine books and my father reading me Terry Pratchet’s Discworld novels. Needless to say I always asked for him to read my bedtime stories, and remember to “do the voices!” (ITS DARK IN HERE, ISN’T IT?)
I loved English. In the first year of secondary school we mostly studied poetry and my hand was always up, ready to give my take on what the poet was really thinking about. If you can analyse a piece of writing you create a window into the author’s soul.
My favourite book which we wrote about for our English coursework was Wuthering Heights. We had to write about Heathcliff - was he a good man, an evil man, insane? I think that love can make you all three. It is a novel choc full of suffering that should have made me think twice about romance.
I try to read everyone I meet, skimming for the interesting details, hearing facts they don’t realise they are giving away. I am analysing their character like a character in a novel and most of the time they come up short, shallow. They are puddles while Heathcliff is an ocean and I sigh with disappointment. I go looking for souls only to be unimpressed by them.
Somehow, I can’t read you at all. You are a book that is written in latin and too complex to translate. A novel made of twists and turns, trickery and confusion.
You are a challenge and I love it, but I need to get it right, need to be sure everything is perfect.