Dearest ‘To Kill a Mockingbird”
Your first few lines made me care about a boy who was both foreign yet so much like me. The next few lines made me care about you, the storyteller who loved the boy, you who were both considerately coherent and delightfully conspiratorial. And from those first few paragraphs that introduced us to each other ¾ I was wary and excited, you were shy but bloomed quickly into a loveliness that lingered, that still lingers ¾ I fell in love with your voice, your perspective, the unflinchingly determined way you had, and still have, of looking at a world marred by ignorance and prejudice.
You were honest in a way I never was with the people around me. I am told that we are often attracted to qualities we find lacking in ourselves and if this is true, I am afraid that my love for you speaks rather badly of me. But my concern for my own image and personality flaws melted away quickly enough under the steady heat of the burn behind your words, radiating passionate and bright like vanilla candles on a cloudless night. Then I fell in love with you like the earth is in love with the sun. Perhaps I was starving for sunlight then. Goodness knows I spend too many hours closeted in my room with my hands full of other books.
But you were the first book to stay with me for weeks, months, and years now, since I first found you in a dusty corner of my sister’s bookshelf. You still have a hold on me no other book has. Well, allowances must be made of course. I was never faithful to you and you know this. You knew going into this ¾ whatever this is between us ¾ that you would find a reader who has known the pleasure of other books, and one who would likely go out to find other books he or she would come to treasure and love the way I love you. See? That sets you apart already. I am using my love for you as a standard for my love of other books. And the fact that you are still the measure simply means that none have measured up to my love for you.
You may not be the only one I’ve ever held and loved. But you will always be the one I return to, again and again, because each time I do you sing, like your mockingbirds, your peace louder, clearer, and your message becomes, especially in troubled times such as these, more and more important. There is an urgency beneath your softness. An undaunted clarity that rings true. I see glimpses of light and beauty in the very spaces between your lines, lines I’ve lost myself in over and over.
I guess, what I am trying to say is, you are to me what reading itself is to me. And more than that, you are important beyond me, beyond my love for you. Your love for me bespeaks a love for humanity, shadowed as our history books are. Yours is a call to people everywhere to be better than they are, to be more loving, to search within us that glimmer of something that binds us all together. Yours is an unselfish love, unlike mine. I love you for purely self-centered reasons I admit. But I am glad that my loving you diminishes nothing of the way you speak to me, to so many of us, so tenderly.
You still burn brightly in my chest,
Hidhir Razak
Your first few lines made me care about a boy who was both foreign yet so much like me. The next few lines made me care about you, the storyteller who loved the boy, you who were both considerately coherent and delightfully conspiratorial. And from those first few paragraphs that introduced us to each other ¾ I was wary and excited, you were shy but bloomed quickly into a loveliness that lingered, that still lingers ¾ I fell in love with your voice, your perspective, the unflinchingly determined way you had, and still have, of looking at a world marred by ignorance and prejudice.
You were honest in a way I never was with the people around me. I am told that we are often attracted to qualities we find lacking in ourselves and if this is true, I am afraid that my love for you speaks rather badly of me. But my concern for my own image and personality flaws melted away quickly enough under the steady heat of the burn behind your words, radiating passionate and bright like vanilla candles on a cloudless night. Then I fell in love with you like the earth is in love with the sun. Perhaps I was starving for sunlight then. Goodness knows I spend too many hours closeted in my room with my hands full of other books.
But you were the first book to stay with me for weeks, months, and years now, since I first found you in a dusty corner of my sister’s bookshelf. You still have a hold on me no other book has. Well, allowances must be made of course. I was never faithful to you and you know this. You knew going into this ¾ whatever this is between us ¾ that you would find a reader who has known the pleasure of other books, and one who would likely go out to find other books he or she would come to treasure and love the way I love you. See? That sets you apart already. I am using my love for you as a standard for my love of other books. And the fact that you are still the measure simply means that none have measured up to my love for you.
You may not be the only one I’ve ever held and loved. But you will always be the one I return to, again and again, because each time I do you sing, like your mockingbirds, your peace louder, clearer, and your message becomes, especially in troubled times such as these, more and more important. There is an urgency beneath your softness. An undaunted clarity that rings true. I see glimpses of light and beauty in the very spaces between your lines, lines I’ve lost myself in over and over.
I guess, what I am trying to say is, you are to me what reading itself is to me. And more than that, you are important beyond me, beyond my love for you. Your love for me bespeaks a love for humanity, shadowed as our history books are. Yours is a call to people everywhere to be better than they are, to be more loving, to search within us that glimmer of something that binds us all together. Yours is an unselfish love, unlike mine. I love you for purely self-centered reasons I admit. But I am glad that my loving you diminishes nothing of the way you speak to me, to so many of us, so tenderly.
You still burn brightly in my chest,
Hidhir Razak