Everything is Illuminated

I've found that I associate different periods of my (short) life with the book that I was reading at the time. There are many periods of my life that don't have a book associated with them because I am not a perfect reader and have gone through long periods of life without a book in hand, which is something that I regret when I think about how many books I could have read by now if I had always been reading one. One good example of my life-book association is from the summer after high school, when I was getting ready to attend U of A.

Lee and I became friends during our junior year of high school. He really liked me, but I didn't really like him, but still wanted to be good friends in the horrible way that girls that don't like you but don't want you to stop liking them always do (I am not proud of what I was like in high school). By the end of senior year we were really good friends and spent a lot of time together (time that I would later learn was really difficult for Lee because he liked me like that and I didn't like him like that). That summer Lee distanced himself from me, probably because we were both going down to Tucson and he was determined that he wasn't going to spend the next 4 years miserably pining for me. We both went to our freshman orientation with our Dads. I think that Lee and his dad stayed somewhere on campus, while my Dad and I stayed in a hotel on Speedway. I had recently started reading Lolita, and became really engrossed in it on the drive down to Tucson.

I forget the details of orientation, but I do remember being in an information session and seeing Lee sitting across the room. We were doing an ice breaker activity, and I wished so badly that I was sitting by him so that i didn't have to interact with the stranger sitting next to me. I kept my eyes on him the whole time, and watched as he chose a cute girl sitting next to him as his partner, and they began to chat comfortably. I was surprised when the sight of him talking to a girl, who happened to be wearing a pair of shoes that I thought only I owned, made me feel sick to my stomach and panicky. Later that afternoon, my Dad and I ran into Lee, and he must have told me (though this doesn't sound anything like Lee) that he got a girl's phone number. I remember wanting to die, but also not realizing why. I guess I had always thought that I would go down to Tucson with Lee and he would continue to be blind to every other girl but me. Suddenly he was interested in other girls, and that night I wondered how I could break the news to my Dad that I didn't want to go to U of A anymore.

I felt sick for the rest of the weekend. My only escape was my book, as cliche as that sounds. I went to as few events as possible, made absolutely no friends, and snuck off to read Lolita whenever I could. I looked forward to the car ride home, when I could lose myself in the tragedy of Humbert's life and compare it to the tragedy of my own life, because I was 18 and truly believed that my life as I knew it was over.

I didn't see much of Lee for the rest of the summer. When school started, the girl was coincidentally living in the same dorm as me, on the same floor. I had to watch Lee walk past my room to help her with her computer. Lee and I had the same friends at U of A, so I had to hear about potential coffee dates and dinner dates and it KILLED ME. I ended up writing him a letter, telling him that things had changed and I loved him. He didn't believe it, his friends didn't believe it, and I'm sure his parents didn't believe it, but the girl had had a boyfriend the whole time but kept it from Lee (all girls are the same...) and Lee and I were in the same math class, so in the end, we were together, and I have been in love with him ever since.

I'm surprised that Lolita is still my all time favorite book, despite the fact that I associate it with this horrible time in my life. Right now I am reading another book that I consider extremely tragic called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I wonder how I will remember it.