Fictional stories provide familiarity, solace in one’s life

I remember, when I was a little kid, I lived for stories: the bedtime stories with heroes, damsels, whimsical glamour and endless magic.

My mom used to reprimand me for staying up late with her large book in my lap, reading and dreaming. That book was so large I could have sat in it, and I often did. I nestled myself in its pages when no one was looking — laid it on my floor and wrapped myself in the letters, the words, the pictures, the creases. That book was so large I used to think it held the world.

But that’s the thing about stories. I took them as truth, as fact, as secrets and narratives written for me, to me, about the greater world — but my mom told me over and over again that stories were just stories, just make-believe. She insisted that little boys did not fly on broomsticks, that big, friendly giants did not collect dreams in jars and that chocolate factories could never make girls into blueberries.

When I read these stories, however, I did not think about logistics or the impossibility of such accounts. I remembered how I felt when I closed the cover: the insatiability of a character’s journey, the descriptions of times and places I would never experience but nevertheless had, in a way, through the eyes, ears, fingers, nose and taste buds of miscellaneous characters.

This summer, something extraordinary happened. I traveled to a place I had read about years and years ago. To jumpstart my backpacking trip after several weeks in Madrid, I found myself first in Pamplona, Spain, running with the bulls. Immediately afterward, with my heart still pounding and my feet still thrumming with the echo of hooves on cobblestone streets, I took a stroll on a beach in San Sebastian.

And with each first step into these unfamiliar territories, I thought the same thing to myself: Ernest Hemingway was right.

In the fifth grade, I read his novel The Sun Also Rises. I remembered the vivid descriptions of a city crazed with extravagant celebration and spewing wine, a city blanketed in white and red. I remembered the calm, soothing air of San Sebastian — the description that Hemingway gave to one of his most beloved sites of serenity. It was déjà vu, even in a place that felt my footsteps for the very first time.

I remember my uncle used to tell me that life is like a book. There are chapters, cliffhangers, unresolved conflicts and heartache. There are footnotes, parentheses, prologues and, sometimes, an epilogue. I asked him — where am I?

You’re still in the first chapter, he told me. You’ve got a long way to go.

For weeks afterward, I dwelled on this potential metaphor. Anything can happen in a book. I could turn into a blueberry, fly a broomstick or even collect dreams in jars with a big, friendly giant. And, like in life, whatever occurs is written down, preserved in ink — unchangeable, irresolvable.

So maybe he has a point: The paradoxical constraints and limitless possibilities of life are represented in the very text of a book.

Let’s talk about real life. I am taking the LSAT Saturday. More than a handful of my friends are taking the MCAT in the spring. Friends are graduating, getting married, having children, traveling the world and experiencing true loss for the first time.

Suddenly, it seems that the world is shifting — for me, for all of us. I feel like I am on the cusp of some great change, some whirlwind moment that will dictate how the rest of my life — the rest of my novel — will go.

Years ago, I played dress-up and pretended I was an adult. I know you did too. We imagined where we would be, who we would become — we placed our dreams beneath our pillows every morning and every night; when our heads laid back down upon that soft recluse, we rediscovered all the whimsical fantasies we had saved.

Where you end up going, where we all end up going, will be sudden and chaotic. There will be sudden bends in the roads that take us in directions we never anticipated — but every success, every small triumph, will still tremble with a hint of familiarity.

It will be déjà vu — because we have all pondered on these moments, we have all seen its brief horizons — and I’m sure, when we imagine the glory of dreams fulfilled, the joy that first began with that first burst of hope will somehow find its way to us, no matter how far we have come or how many pages we have turned along the way.

Tiffany Yang is a junior majoring in comparative literature. Her column, “Alphabet Soup,” ran Wednesdays.