chaiNboli

  There was a year of my life when I spent most of my days in bed. I had no energy to get up. Days passed in that strange, shapeless way they do when you aren't quite living them. I read the same book again and again— The Blind Assassin . I returned to it with the desperation of someone returning to a place where nobody asked questions. There was something fucking liberating about being in Sakiel-Norn. An imaginary planet, with its twin suns and its strange civilizations and its stories nested inside stories. I could disappear there. Not dramatically. Not even consciously. I simply had somewhere else to be. I often wonder now who I identified with when I read the book. Laura or Iris? I don't know. Perhaps that was the point. Maybe some part of me wanted to be Laura—the girl who seemed too strange for the world she had been given, who could never quite learn the rules everyone else seemed to understand. And perhaps another part of me was Iris, looking backwards, trying ...