#ebertram

Al vijf eeuwen zijn de Romeinen heer en meester over België. De Frankische vorst Claudion, die de voogdij over ons land krijgt tussen het jaar 428 en 447, slaagt er in om de macht en in invloed van Rome in de streek grondig af te bouwen. België is na zijn bewind niet langer Romeins maar wel degelijk Frankisch gebied geworden. De chefs van een reeks Frankische clans kunnen zonder verdere…

(Kind of an odd one, just a warning. haha I also listened to A Thousand Years by Christina Perry the entire time while working on this, so if you want to read it while that's on it might flow kind of nicely!)

 I’ve loved the word “haunt” since I was six. I don’t remember how I came upon the word, most six year olds don’t use the word haunt unless they’re talking about Halloween, but my mother remembers vividly the moment I came up to her in the kitchen and said that she was hauntingly beautiful. She doesn’t remember it because it was a compliment, but because she was completely shocked by my word choice.

I love the word and all its variations. It can mean so many different things, but the definition that is most appealing to me is ‘to stay around or persist : linger’. I’ve always had a feeling that nothing is ever really gone, that it all just lingers around us, waiting to be noticed.

I read a lot of books and what I’ve found myself wondering is why no one has ever talked about how we linger. The people in literature are always lingering around readers. They stay in our minds, quietly sitting in the background, watching us whizz through life, occasionally coming to the forefront to remind us of the things they taught us. What I’ve enjoyed thinking about, however, is how we linger in their lives.

I’m not crazy. I just feel that I need to state that. What I mean is, I read these books and think of the characters as real people. I connect with them; feel their pains and their joys. I was thinking about this one day as I was walking to my favorite library, and I went a step further. What if, in an alternate universe, these characters we’ve all grown up reading about and who have stayed in our minds are actual people? And we’re the characters they read about. It’s a magical thing to wonder about. 

My parents moved to Georgia before I was born, and spent the two years before my birth converting an old boarding house into a livable home for us. They weren’t necessarily big readers, but they knew it was important, so they kept one room as a small library and work room for me.

  They took pictures before they renovated it and every time I see the pictures I wish they hadn’t touched it. Before they had it fixed up it had grown wild. Vines leaked in through the cracked glass of the ceiling and clung to the walls. There was a small tree near the windows, growing up through the broken floor, and the previous owners had some baskets and bird cages hanging from it. Dead plants were sitting everywhere and the windows were dirty but still allowed sun to filter through them. Since then my parents had the ceiling fixed, no more plants came through the floor or the ceiling, and the tree was now gone. The bird cages remained, hung from various places in the ceiling. But every time I see the picture I long to know who had lived there before me, to know their stories. It seemed to me to be out of some novel about an abandoned house, deeply loved in its time but tragically left for some reason. I imagined a whole story for it, comprised of characters and plots and haunting music. Sometimes when I sit in the room I look around and wonder if they are still around me somehow. As if my study was the one place on Earth where the worlds we think of as fiction blur to meet what we call reality. As if the characters I’d discovered there were still living there, wondering about me.

 The walk to my favorite library is beautiful, but if you were to ask me I’d say most things in Georgia are. The library is in a large manor house at the end of a very long driveway that began at a set of stone pillars with an old iron gate attached. I’d never seen the gate closed, but every time I passed through it I was reminded of Jane Austen for some reason. I don’t remember specifically there being a gate in any of those stories, but there is something about stones so old and a long driveway through the middle of a great green lawn that brings forward the need to re-read Mansfield Park (my personal favorite. Most would say Pride and Prejudice but I prefer Fanny Price). This feeling brings me back to my wonderings and I smile at the idea that Austen’s novels aren’t just novels somewhere. In that alternate world Fanny Price is out there and I wonder where she is and if I’m just a ghost passing through her life, like she is in mine.

The library is delightfully old and the entire place smells of old books, which is a smell that I can’t ever get tired of. My favorite section is in the very back along the floor. On the bottom shelf of a ceiling high bookshelf there are collections of various journals and diaries belonging to various people, none of them famous, which makes it more fun in my opinion. These journals, I don’t know how or why, are amazing and beautiful. More so than any journal I have ever had in my life, despite my desperate attempts to make them look worn and used. These journals are full of the private thoughts of people who came long before me and what I like to imagine as I read them is that the library in the alternate universe holds my journal and a girl like me is reading it, as I am reading hers.

 Again, I want to stress that I’m not crazy and I’m not bored with my life, or any of the excuses you can think of for why I’d imagine all of this craziness, but doesn’t it add to what’s around you? Thinking about it the way someone else would, or imagining who came there first? I’d like to imagine that someday someone will think about what I thought of something, to have my character linger on through someone. I mean, I’m no Atticus Finch or Hermoine Granger, but I’d like to think that I will be felt…be remembered.

There’s an old bridge by the river that runs through our town. If you go down the hill that leads to its base you’ll find that the pillars holding it up are covered with names. Not really graffiti, just names. Names of people who want to be remembered. I like to read there, sitting against one of the large pillars. Sometimes the fog rolls in if it's early, and sometimes you can catch a whiff of the ocean from the breeze. It’s an empty and mostly uninteresting place, which is the best for reading, in my opinion, though nothing is ever really empty and uninteresting.

When I read I empty my mind of everything and imagine it to be an empty room. Its somewhat dark, there is a bench where I sit, and watch. As I start to read things begin to appear in the room.

 Depending on what I’m read that day it usually begins with the scene around the characters and I. For example, if I’m reading an older mystery the transformation begins with fog, which started to change the way the room is lit. Fog covered the floor, erases the walls and ceiling and I’m suddenly standing on the ground, surrounded by gray fog. Then a tree appears, and the fog rolls back to reveal water. Eventually the character appears and it is as if I’m a ghost in their lives, watching them go about without knowing I’m watching.

I suppose this is all me trying to convey a message to someone. A message saying what I’m not sure exactly. That I want to be remembered? That I want to imagine another world where the characters in books are the normal people and I and the world around me are fictitious? That I’m crazy and need to be institutionalized? I don’t know. I guess I’m just trying to find out why I look at the world around me and instead of thinking that its beautiful or that its ugly, I wonder about who lingers on there. Or it reminds me of a book I’ve read.

I feel like we all disappear into books when we read. Or we’re supposed to at least. And the worlds we visit when we disappear…why can’t they be real? Why can’t they exist somewhere out there? I find the idea of that comforting and exciting. Sometimes I wish, as I’m walking down the street somewhere, that if I take one more step I’d be in a different place, where everything is different. I get so tired of my life sometimes, the routines and expectations, and I guess these worlds that I’ve imagined keep me from going insane.

I love Ravenclaws who also love me ;D