#hanaleeappreciationweek

On weekends, Kiara would encourage her to sleep in a little more. She knew Hana would appreciate the opportunity to binge-read cover-to-cover - perhaps re-read if she really liked the material.

It's been three months now since she's been able to complete a chapter, much less a book.

Hana stretches, catlike, before blindly groping for the book she'd left abandoned on the bedside table. The Crown and the Flame. It's an abridged version, one she'd carried from her childhood home and always found herself devouring in less than two hours...yet somehow she hasn't been able to move past Dominic Hunter's account of his first encounter with a young Princess Kenna at a Beltane festival.

Hana wishes she know how - when! - it had come to this.

When she got married to Kiara last year, it was almost as if the floodgates had opened on everything. Whatever Esther had predicted in that patisserie in Paris - maybe you're fated to be a prim, girly girl adventurer who has unknown depths just waiting to be found! - seemed to be on the cusp of becoming a reality.

Back home in Shanghai, almost every morsel of literature Hana managed to devour was a guilty pleasure; she'd hidden books in secret corners, savoured words and worlds unknown underneath the comforting cocoon of a blanket, uttered half-truths to keep the more scandalous material out of her parents' hands, weaved happy endings and bright futures for favourite couples and charactes, long after she had put the books down.

Hana wonders now if half the fun, back then, was in the secrecy. If half the comfort had come from sharing space with Father and Mother, and knowing they would never truly be able to capture the joy she experienced from reading or make it their own. There was a freedom in that - and for Hana, any freedom would be a luxury to be savoured, like a bonbon from a visiting relative, savoured bite by tiny bite just so the pleasure could last a bit longer.

That shift in circumstances when she married Kiara, had been overwhelming. And perhaps the way she had just gone rogue the minute Kiara gifted her her own personal library, was to be expected.

No rules, no restrictions, no restraints on what she could or couldn't read. The cocoon of her blankets gave way to the vast expanse of her library, with its wide welcoming spaces, its winding staircases, its comforting, velvet seats that allowed her to sink into them, whenever she felt like having a reading marathon.

(Which was often).

Hana had spent so much of her childhood looking over her shoulder as she devoured her books, that the idea of just reading whatever the hell she wanted felt overwhelming. But she grabbed it. With both hands. And embraced the prospect. With all her heart. Hours and hours perusing over every possible scrap of reading material she could find - history, mythology, mystery fiction, true crime, even gothic horror (which she didn't expect to wholeheartedly love the way she does now!).

Whenever the two of them got even a sliver of free time, Kiara would come to expect that Hana would suggest sneaking into the library first.

(For a reading session? To ravish each other against the bookshelves, sending an entire pile of French Renaissance literature tumbling to the floor? Both possibilities held equal appeal)

Hana would even give the occasional gossip rag the once-over, though the abysmal editing and the awful typos made her grit her teeth on occasion.

It was glorious. Novels, poetry, essay collections, her favourite mythological retellings. There was nothing Hana wouldn't read; this library was her oyster. Some evenings when Kiara came home later than Hana did, she wouldn't even bother searching anywhere else in their manor - she'd just make a beeline to the library.

That was a year ago.

Wearily, Hana places a bookmark (handmade, laminated, with pressed dried flowers she had selected herself) on the very page she'd opened, letting out a soft sigh. It's almost as if - after the exhilaration of reading whenever and whatever she liked - her brain has decided it's had enough, and has shut down.

In the first two weeks of this strange predicament, Hana had tried to put it down to different things. Overwork, or the aftermath of juggling all her new roles and all the new skills she'd managed to learn. Perhaps her reading has suffered because she doesn't have the time.

But she knows in her heart that that isn't quite true. Hana isn't sure she has been as free in her life as she has been these past few months. Her calendar has been freed up considerably; she's managed to have more romantic dates with Kiara in the past month than they'd had all year. It can't be a lack of time or even general fatigue, because these days she doesn't do much else that taxes the mind.

No - she has the time. She has the resources - thanks to Kiara, far too much of the resources. And there's no question that she has the desire to keep reading. She just can't ever bring herself to finish.

As she places the book, dully, back on the bedside table, Hana feels a slender arm snaking its way around her waist, a chin nestling against her shoulder with a murmur of approval.

"Mon ange," Kiara whispers, her voice rough, grainy, deep, like freshly-ground coffee. She plants a kiss on Hana's shoulder, lacing their fingers together.

Lazily, Hana turns in Kiara's arms and moves her hands so she can lightly finger her curls, marvelling at how soft they feel in her hands. Kiara takes a long, hard look at Hana as her vision clears, probably wondering what she's hiding. Hana wishes her wife wasn't so good at guessing when something doesn't feel right.

She tries hard to school her features into something more neutral - more fitting for someone who just woke up and wasn't ruminating over something she has lost - but Kiara has never been that easy to fool.

"Everything's okay?" Kiara says, "You've been looking a bit...off for the past few weeks."

Hana looks down, pretending to busy herself with the crocheted fringes of the blanket. Could she laugh it off? Claim that her wife is probably overthinking, that she is worrying over nothing?

Because in the grand scheme of things, it is nothing. She's been doing well. She's never been happier than she is now - she has a home, a purpose, a wife she is madly in love with, passions that she's never felt more free to pursue!

She curses herself as she begins to feel that tell-tale burn in her throat. Struggling to read a book shouldn't affect her this much.

She looks up at Kiara, and almost begins to lie. But Hana knows she's not the best of liars, that most times her eyes give her away. Kiara's fingers are already moving towards the corners of her eyes, brushing the teardrops away.

Hana sniffles. "It's silly."

"Humour me," Kiara nudges her gently. "I don't care how stupid it sounds."

Hana sighs, and tells her. Midway through it all, Kiara props up two pillows against the bedstand and gets them to sit up, Hana safely ensconced in her arms. She tells Kiara everything. How much joy she'd had every time she'd picked up a book. How that joy would spring up double fold if it was about something she barely understood. How easy it was, a year ago, to speed-read the first time, then savour re-reads. How - whenever she felt a little bit naughty - she'd read a book backwards, from the last chapter to the first; giggling as she came to the beginning of the book knowing how it would end.

How...of late...she can find no fun, no joy, in turning to the next page - much less the end of a book.

"It's a stupid, stupid thing to worry about," Hana rails on, "I can just imagine my people at Krysanthe looking at me and shaking their heads and thinking 'oh, the Duchess and her first-world-problems'."

Kiara laughs gently, snuggling Hana closer to her. She passes a small handkerchief to her free hand. "That's all of us, with our people. And they're not completely wrong - of course our lives have always been far better and easier than theirs...most times through their labour. But that doesn't mean that you have to ignore things that confuse or distress you, ma moité." Her hand caresses Hana's shoulder in an attempt to give comfort. "And learning that a pastime so beloved no longer gives you the joy you always got from it...is bound to confuse you."

Hana blows her nose into the handkerchief. "I think a part of it is that...I'm beginning to wonder if I was lying to myself about loving reading books, this whole time."

She takes a deep breath, running her hands back and forth over the soft blanket for comfort. "And if I did...what else have I been lying to myself about? What else will I find I don't like, now that my parents can't dictate the way I live my life? Fashion? Poetry? Music??" Hana takes in a deep breath, almost shocked at the things she's revealing because she hardly ever allowed herself to dwell upon any of this before, much less say it out loud. "What if there's nothing that I liked that I can't put down to parental pressure? What if I keep unraveling, and peeling off, everything I thought I was and find that I'm...well...nothing?"

For one moment, Kiara's eyes seem to search her face, frowning deeply. Then her body goes slack, only her hands enfolding her in a tight, comforting hug. She sighs softly against Hana's hair. "Oh, Hana."

For several minutes, Kiara says nothing - just cradles Hana in her arms, rocking her back and forth, her hands moving in a light caress up and down her spine. When she feels Hana go calmer, she moves her hands to her face, cupping her cheeks.

"What you're facing right now...that's something almost every book lover will have gone through, sometime or other. Especially if their passion was something they had to keep a secret, and they suddenly find that they're no longer bound by any rules or restrictions."

Hana raises her eyes to Kiara's face. "Even you?"

Kiara laughs. "I'm not exactly as passionate about reading as you are, but I've seen that fatigue in Baba often. And I've faced that often with my translation work too. It's what happens when you haven't learnt yet how to regulate your passions. You do too much, you overtax your mind. And maybe this phase...maybe it's your brain and your body screaming for you to find a little bit of balance, darling."

It's now Hana's turn to frown. "What do you mean?"

Kiara's eyes dart upwards, in that way it does whenever she is pondering deeply over the best way to convey a thought. And then she suddenly smiles, almost as if she's found the perfect way to get it across. "You do love chocolate, don't you?"

Hana takes a long, hard look at Kiara's face, then bursts into delighted laughter. "Well, it's impossible to argue about or deny that!"

"What if you gave yourself unlimited access to it...no restrictions, no holds barred, allowing yourself to have as much of it as you've wanted all the time? Would it always taste the same?"

Gazing into her wife's face, Hana marvels at how perfect this analogy is. How fitting. "Of course not. I'd maybe even grow a little sick of it at some point!"

"Does that mean you'd been lying to yourself about loving it this whole time?"

Hana throws back her head and laughs, a full-throated joyful sound this time. "You could even say I'd probably get back to remembering how wonderful it tasted if I spent a little time away from it."

Grinning, Kiara bumps her forehead playfully into Hana's. "Only a bookworm would understand a metaphor that quickly. I wasn't even halfway through explaining that."

Hana slips her hands into Kiara's curls again, just the way she knows her wife likes it. She lets out a watery giggle. "That's very nice to hear."

Kiara exhales and shakes her head. "So much has changed for you, Hana. And it isn't your fault that you found freedom in a thing you loved and pushed yourself into it so much. It's natural for someone who was expected to live her entire life on someone else's terms." She holds one of Hana's hands tight within her own. "When we got married, you approached your reading the way a child would approach a shop full of bonbons for the very first time. Now you're learning the more adult way of doing it - enjoy it... but never too much all at once."

Smiling, her eyes a tiny bit watery, Hana gently cups her wife's chin. "So wise, for one so young," she teases gently.

Kiara playfully punches her arm, pursing her lips in muffled laughter. "Stop sounding like my Baba and act more like my mrati."

In higher spirits now, Hana gives Kiara a quick kiss, then makes a move to get off the bed. "All this talk of chocolate is making me hungry. What do you say I make us a mug each of my special hot chocolate, now that it's almost teatime?"

Kiara smiles, sighing in relief. These are not the words of a woman who is trying to move away, unsuccessfully, from thoughts that disturb her, or an attempt to change the subject. Just a sign that her intrusive, self-flagellation thoughts are moving in a different direction. A better direction.

She nods, eagerly. "Hayati," she says, giving her wife a saucy grin, "when have I ever said no to your hot chocolate?"

--

Translations:

Ma moité - French for "my other half"

Hayati - Darija/Arabic for "my life"

Mon ange - French for "my angel"

Baba, Mrati - Moroccan Darija terms for addressing one's father and wife, respectively