The first book that made me cry was We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss. Unimaginably depressing, it recounts the story of Toby and Luke, two best friends from similarly neglectful families who dreamed since childhood that they would repair the old, two-seater plane that crashed deep within the woods near their town and run away. However, as Toby and Luke grow up, they realize their naivete and understand that escaping their circumstances will be harder than they always believed. The friendship between Toby and Luke consequently starts to fracture as they begin to succumb to the pressure of their lives. The novel concludes with a heart-wrenching narration from Luke which is as nihilistic as it is beautiful and as uplifting as it is melancholy. 

The novel propelled me into such deep and thorough sadness that I was–and still am–terrified to reread it. I long to do so. I see We’ll Fly Away on the shelf whenever I visit the library. Inevitably, I pick it up, turn it over, and drag my hand along the synopsis. Every time, I consider signing it out, but am overcome with worry. Am I emotionally stable enough to revisit this story? It’s a genuine question. Or, what if I reread it and find that it does not make me nearly as sad as it did the first time? Such would be equally as upsetting. It would taint my impression of the novel and I would be forced to attribute the way the story made me feel previously as that to do with moronic middle school dramatics. Maybe I should just allow We’ll Fly Away to exist as a feeling in the back of my chest. I barely remember the events of the story. I only remember how it left me–desolate, and barren of thought. 

My inability to reread We’ll Fly Away is not isolated to this particular novel. I feel the same way with  every other book Bryan Bliss has written. I adore his writing style and remember basking in its painful simplicity and lonely atmosphere. I yearn for more of it. More of him. Yet I cannot revisit his work—the risk is too high. What if I dislike it? Such would mar my good impression of his writing beyond repair. I would not be able to properly and objectively experience his novels without comparing it to what We’ll Fly Away made me experience . Nothing about me reading a second Bryan Bliss novel would be impartial. Instead, all is bathed and bloodied with my desperation for a perfect re-emulation of We’ll Fly Away. 

The worst part is that my irrationality does not only claim precedence over Bryan Bliss’ We’ll Fly Away. I find myself experiencing a similar, mind-numbing dilemma with another book—one of my favourites. It is one that has been steadily meandering around my top ten reads of all time: Picture Us In The Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert. 

Now, I have read Picture Us In The Light dozens of times. It does not scare me the way the aforementioned We’ll Fly Away does. However, because my love for Picture Us In The Light is so fierce and ever-present, I am entirely paralyzed and incapable of ever reading another book by Kelly Loy Gilbert as I know it will not match up. I need it to match up. What if Gilbert’s style is not as enthralling to me the second time around? I will feel ashamed of my passion for Picture Us In The Light altogether. It will be ruined for me permanently. 

I cannot read sequels. I am yet to read the sequel to another of my favourite novels: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe because I fret for these very reasons. What if I hate it? It will render me unable to ever revisit the first book because I will always be thinking of the unpleasantness which follows. 

I am obsessed with the purity of my memories. Not only in literature, but in every facet of my life. I hate to repeat things. I hate to taint something which once made me feel–good or bad. Despite my ache to relive wild and all-consuming emotions, I do not allow myself to indulge in the same act twice. I cannot experience things organically when I do them a second time. I continuously force myself to try and emulate the same experience; I try to tell the same jokes, create the same environments. It is my shameful attempt at time travelling. I do not live so far in the past that I am incapable of recognizing the sporadic joyousness of the present–I’d like to say I just live yesterday. Maybe two days ago. It takes me a while to play catch-up, because while time treks on around me, I am still busy basking in the warm-toned shimmering nostalgia of the day before. 

 I do not miss places, yet instead  miss the very way I was when occupying any given space. Though I can return to the same physical spot I once was an infinite amount of times, I can never gain back the circumstances which made it so special. 

I hate this. 

I hate that things have to be special and I hate that I never realize how painfully I will wish to be back somewhere while I am in it. It is a curse. Sometimes, I do realize it. Sometimes, when I am sitting in a park at nighttime, when I am with my friends, when I am playing basketball or chatting about life, I  think: this is going to be an important memory, someday. You will want to be back here. Remember this feeling. Just like that, I’ve sabotaged myself. I’ve ruined the authenticity of my memory. I  force myself to regard the night fondly without remembering any of what made it so grand to begin with. The memory is no longer me enjoying a summer night with people I love, but instead, it is just me, thinking about how great this moment will be once it is nothing more than a memory. Shit. I just blew it, didn’t I? 

I danced in The Nutcracker twice. Once in the winter of the eighth grade (October 2018 to January 2019) and once in the winter of the ninth grade (December 2019 to January 2020). The latter is what I recall wistfully and confidently as the most magical, eventful, and fantastic month of my life. This Nutcracker season was interspersed with the meeting of my newest best friend, and (soon-to-be) first boyfriend. We met through a friend I danced with in this very show—I spoke with him obsessively. I spoke with him in the brief intervals I received cellular data on my train rides to the Four Seasons Centre and in bathroom stalls where I hid my phone from the Nutcracker ensemble supervisors. I spoke with him up until I was queued to rush upstairs and pull on my unflattering costume, and perform the ballet to an audience of hundreds. It was exhilarating—knowing he was waiting for me to return once my run had finished. My friends teased me incessantly about him. I pretended not to like it. We met, in person, after a Nutcracker rehearsal. I remember sitting on the studio floor in my leotard and ballet flats, staring at the ticking clock on the wall as our dance teachers and rehearsal supervisors lectured us about how to properly store our shoes in the cubbies. I tapped my foot impatiently. We were supposed to be seeing a movie and I was going to be late. When we were dismissed, I leapt from the floor and ran unceremoniously to gather my bag. I pestered my mother about driving faster the whole way to the theatre. As it turned out, I was not late. I was even early. I bought both our movie tickets before he even arrived (much to his displeasure as he had wanted to do the same for me) and we were together less than a month later. We still are today. 

Sometimes, I miss the Nutcracker more than I can bear. My heart aches when I remember it but the more I ponder my Nutcracker memories, the more I wonder if it was even the ballet I missed or if it was, instead, the love story transpiring in the background? After all, when I recount to my friends my experiences in the Nutcracker, I am rarely speaking about the ballet itself. Rather, I describe to them the loud discussions my friend and I had about the latest Star Wars film. The bustling dressing rooms. The Starbucks after shows had ended. The subway in the dead of the night, as I trained home after a show. And, of course, I am speaking about him— how it was this Nutcracker season that brought us together. I do not miss the ballet. I do not miss the sweaty costumes, and I do not miss how I could not see anything on stage without my glasses and the addition of a vision-obscuring character mask. I do not miss arriving four hours early only to dance for fifteen minutes and to be sent home. When I discovered that I would be missing this year’s Nutcracker season—which likely would have been my last one–I was thoroughly disappointed. I longed to recreate old experiences and feelings. Then, I realized they were feelings impossible to recreate. The three friends who made my Nutcracker experience so lively have all begun university and would not be returning alongside me. I could not re-debate Star Wars with my one friend, and I could not re-get Starbucks after shows with the other. Most of all, I could not re-meet my boyfriend at the movie theatre, after that fateful Sunday rehearsal. What I miss—that thrilling, whirlwind of winter—is gone for good. Should I be in the Nutcracker again, I would only be underwhelmed. This isn’t what this is supposed to feel like, I would likely think. 

Maybe it is ridiculous, and maybe I am turning nothing into something for the sake of having anything to lament over, but why does it matter? I’m the one making myself miserable, and I reserve the petty right to do so. I want to build my time machine–travel in a way that does not disrupt physics. I want to sit as a fly on a wall and watch and rewatch and rewatch my memories until my eyes are bloodshot and my throat has run dry. Let me feel this way again—I don’t care how sad I may have been, I just want to feel it again. Is this some form of diluted masochism? To wish to keep former anguish alive, and to wish to leave it unchanged? 

I see the repetition of memories like a petulant younger sibling or parent accidentally recording a movie they wanted to watch over the series finale of your favourite show on the television. It’s gone now. It’s been replaced. This worries me. I try to leave things be, but I seem to be unable to, forever wanting to retry and be given a second chance to bathe in feelings I once had. This only ever displaces the impact of the first time around. Even if I choose to ignore the second, falsified, inorganic version of the memory, I will never be able to reminisce about the first one again, because I will be constantly aware of how it ends. How it was not perfect. I’m more interested in how something will feel when it is over than I am in how it feels now. I know what this says about me—about my restlessness. It seems so dramatic. So unnecessarily pretentious. When I’ve spoken about this before, I’ve been met with perplexed eyes. Just reread the book? They say, plainly, as though it’s that simple. Although the idea of polluting my first impressions did not send a winding and inescapable panic through my body. I guess it doesn’t actually matter as much as I say. I am known for my melodramatics—I claim loftily that the most mundane of events have ‘changed my life,’ and I flail my arms over my head when I describe the latest unimportant book I’ve read or film I’ve seen. This is likely just an addition to this same ostentatiousness. 

I do not like to think in this way—not any longer. I am tired of dismissing anything and everything about myself and the way my mind works to childlike hysterics– the way I’ve done since I was young to bring a lighthearted self-awareness to my strange way of thinking. Yeah, I know it’s stupid; I’ll placate people who mock me with shy eyes and nervous laughter. I think it’s beautiful to leave something hanging, still as an encased painting, in the past. Thanks to my compulsion, the cavernous museum of my life is in pristine condition. And I don’t see why this has to be a bad thing. My memory is so organized,so meticulously categorized between stories I dare not revisit versus stories I share with glee. I am a warlock. a time travelling, memory keeping master of my mind. It is how I keep control of my feelings, deciding what to think of, deciding when to leave it to rest. Let me be dramatic, unashamedly. Let me burn the books I’ve disowned, and let me never dance the Nutcracker again. I was there when I was meant to be there, and I refuse to destroy the sanctity of what I have created. I have worked too hard for too long to avoid the mutilation of my memories to be ridiculed as somebody who is stagnant, lives in the past, and never looks ahead. As nothing more than a theatrical teenage girl. I am more than this, and my memories are more than this. 

I wonder if I have always caged off my memories so fiercely because I worried they would be all I had before everything ended for me. Now, I am several years past where I thought my life would come to a close, and the stakes seem much lower. My memories don’t need to be so guarded anymore because I have time now. I have time to get them wrong a second time but get them right on the third. But, despite this admission—this agonizing and vulnerable admission—I do not think I was ever wrong for keeping my memories so free from soiling. I think I was cautious, and I had every right to be. 

Maybe, someday, I’ll reread We’ll Fly Away. Maybe I’ll reread it next week. I know it won’t be the same. Maybe it doesn’t have to be.