A Sentimental Journey through Pigtails and other Reflections

Reading is like blonde pigtails shining in the afternoon September sun, like melted milk chocolate, like long walks in search for chestnuts.

It all started when I was five years old, my brother was a bun just out of the oven and our mother had all the time in the world to dedicate to Emil and me. I remember how fascinated I was by letters and how I insisted on having reading and writing lessons every day, considering them so important that I found it a requirement to dress up in my fluffiest dresses, to sit as straight as I could and be as gentle as the most fragile little swan from, my then favorite, Swan Lake Pas de Quatre.

Those first workbooks that lead me to conquering the magical worlds of Lottie and Lisa and Emil and the Detectives I only remember through a mist. I know that they were green and orange, with geese and raccoons on the covers, and for some reason they were appealing to my young self. And these were not the only strange looking books that I thoroughly enjoyed.

One of my most cherished possessions as a child, besides a Barbie doll’s horse, was a battered and worn book of fairytales by the brothers Grimm. I called it “rongyos könyv”, or as it would translate into English: the raggy book. It had no covers, they were probably lost somewhere between the sixties and the seventies when my mother was a child, and not only were the pages filled to the brink with beautiful letters, but they seemed to be overflowing from the way that every leaf was searching for a way to escape the confines of the single tome. The only other book that I ever loved to bits, literally, was J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, now held together only by some adhesive tape which gives it a smell that offers me comfort and a sense of security years after I’ve last read it.

Starting elementary school, I soon discovered the magical worlds of Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins, allowing myself to get lost in these narratives, substituting Neverland for Hogwarts and Middle Earth. Reading became an opportunity to discover all that which my scientifically inclined parents never even thought of teaching me. I would defy gravity and gobble up stories about universes where laws of physics did not apply and transporting was possible with no more than a pinch of floo powder. I spent most of my teens treading the grounds of fantasy in search for new discoveries.

As I got older I acquired a taste for irony and the absurd, an appreciation for the classical, a strange pull to the sentimental, a fascination with the dark and respect for the unconventional. I started off with Shakespeare and ended up with e. e. cummings. I glorify Keats and admire Dorothy Parker. I sing of Whitman and always keep a little Dickinson on my bedside table. My fluffy pastel dresses and blond pigtails have turned into sonnets, my fantastic adventures into narratives. From those ragged books I have come to speak Yossarian, dance Bovary, and breathe The Fair Youth. I am shaped by what I read, I become what I write.