My Christmas Novel. ‘Try to read it every yuletide.
—Starting this one. 

    He was writing what he should have written long ago and had always wished to write but never could. Now it came to him quite easily, he wrote eagerly and said exactly what he wanted to say. Only now and then a boy got in his way, a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat worn fur-side out, as in the Urals or Siberia.
     He knew for certain that this boy was the spirit of his death or, to put it quite plainly, that he was his death. Yet how could he be his death if he was helping him to write a poem? How could death be useful, how was it possible for death to be a help?
    The subject of his poem was neither the entombment nor the resurrection but the days between; the title was “Turmoil.”
    He had always wanted to describe how for three days the black, raging, worm-filled earth had assailed the deathless incarnation of love, storming it with rocks and rubble—- as waves fly and leap at the seacoast, cover and submerge it— how for three days the black hurricane of earth raged, advancing and retreating.

Two lines kept coming into his head:
“We are glad to be near you,” and “Time to wake up.”
    Near him, touching him, were hell, dissolution, corruption, death, and equally near him were the spring and Mary Magdalene, and life. And it was time to awake. Time to wake up and to get up. Time to arise, time for resurrection. 

I picked up reading Les Misérables earlier in the year. I wrote this half-way through as a personal reflection, but it’s just been collecting dust in my drafts box ever since. Every time I’d work on it, it’d get too personal and I’d be overcome with anxiety to post it. But with the growth and transformation I’ve had in the past half year, a lot of these words and thoughts have lost their sensitivity, and I have little reserves of holding back.  

Reading through Les Misérables, a book I adored in my adolescence, I was remembered all over again how big an impression that novel had on me growing up.

The first time reading Hugo’s novel, I was 15, back in high school. I only got a quarter through— never even saw the barricades rise. But that was fine by me. Back then, the whole epic tale of a thousand-so-pages all dissolved and faded  behind nothing more than the beautiful tale between Valjean and Cossette. That was the center; everything else was relative. Marius I cared nothing for, a minor role; his love with Cossette a mere side-plot, or conclusion, to that of her and Valjean. The barricades, the revolutionaries, Javert and the social commentaries; all of it was all just added color drowned behind the relationship of the kind convict and his little orphan. The rest was all just to show what a father would go through for love of his daughter. 

And I realized now this sheds a little light into the life I had as a kid.

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