Romance Between the Stacks
My wife and I met because of books. I had been working in a bookstore for over a year with no romantic prospects, but then a particular girl was hired to do the same job as me. We both vividly remember the first words I spoke to her, even though we had different interpretations of those words.
“Oh, so you’re Jennifer,” I said upon meeting her on her first day of work.All I meant was that I had heard about her from a mutual friend before she started. Jennifer still thinks my statement had more negative overtones than I intended, but those were the only words I could come up with while by being struck by love at first sight. It is true that for a moment in time upon first meeting someone, we can be distracted by physical beauty – long red hair; smooth porcelain skin; the greatest smile I had ever seen – but it gradually takes on a more spiritual connection. Upon getting to know her better, she became more beautiful. Her inner charm radiated. Her attractiveness snowballed. I wasn’t looking for Jennifer, and she wasn’t looking for me, but love at first sight is a hard feeling to shake.
When our shifts coincided, we worked alongside each other in the bookstore. We shelved books. We helped customers find titles they couldn’t find on their own. We snuck secret glances of each other from across the store. We talked about books during our shifts. We basked in the aroma of paperbacks. We bonded over discussions about the works of authors that we both admired and made fun of what we thought were the other’s guilty pleasures (hers – Nora Roberts; mine – Stephen King). After two months of this, we went on our first date and continued seeing each other amongst the stacks while working and hanging out a fair bit in our spare time.
Three months after that first date, I was scheduled to embark on a four-week backpacking trip to Chile that I had planned before meeting Jennifer. As my departure drew closer, we were both surprised to find ourselves falling into a relationship that had unexpectedly jumped out from behind a bookshelf to grab our hearts and twirl them around in a frenzy of pittering and pattering. The night before my departure, we realized we would be missing each other when I left for another country for one month, but I was a traveller at heart and would be back to pick up where we left off upon my return. On that night, Jennifer gave me a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies and this touched me beyond anything else, as if there was nothing else she could do to impress me more. But then she did impress me more – she gave me her copy of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The book was one of her favourites and she knew I had never read it. She wanted me to take it on my trip to remember her.
I was going to be absent for a while, wandering carefree out in the world, but those cookies and that book changed how I felt about what I would be coming home to. We had not reached the point of saying that we loved each other yet, but we both sensed it was leading up to being serious. As a booklover myself, I knew she was taking a big step by trusting me with her favourite book and this told me all I needed to know about how she felt about me.
On my overnight flight to Santiago, I read The Little Prince cover to cover. The story is about flying away from grown-up responsibilities, about getting lost, about inter-planetary travel, about acquiring knowledge, about finding your way home. I could not stop thinking about Jennifer as I held the book in my lap, as I read the words of this fabulously imaginative story. Just as I could not shake the sense of being cast under the spell of love at first sight when we first met, I was not able to shake the urge to see her again when I returned home. To cut a long story short, after two weeks into my trip, my feelings of homesickness intensified. I had never abandoned a trip before, but was having serious thoughts about going home early. I missed the familiarity of my life back home, of working in the bookstore, of mingling with the people I worked with (especially one person), so I booked a ticket home. After a twelve-hour flight back to Canada, I called Jennifer.
When she answered the phone, I said, “Oh, so you’re Jennifer.”
I was hoping it had a different tone than the first time I used that line. At least she knew it was me on the other end of the phone and expressed surprise about me being home early.
“Being so far away, I learned that ‘what is essential is invisible to the eye.’”
“I see you read my book,” she said.
It was a quote from The Little Prince I had committed to memory to impress her. In my heart, it had become obvious that our dating would continue when I returned home. It could very well be that by having a physical piece of her – in the form of her favourite book – with me, I was urged to get home sooner than expected. After I slept off my jet lag, we met the next day and the first thing I did was hand her back The Little Prince. It had come with me for thousands of kilometres and its wise words had given me plenty to think about, but from one booklover to another I knew I needed to return it straight away.
“Now that I’ve read it, I see why it’s your favourite. Thank you for trusting me with it.”
“I needed a reason for you to come home,” she smirked. “I knew you would return it.”
We went back to our routine of shelving and selling books, not so secretly enjoying each other’s company again in the ambiance of the bookstore. We were engaged eight months later, and married six months after that. We met because of books, we connected over one particular book even when separated by continents, but we have stayed together for thirteen years (and counting) because of the love story we continue to write ourselves.
