swoon

You know how when you're infatuated with someone you have this fantasy of spending an entire day in bed with them? Maybe you fantasize about this person spying on you in the night, even though your rational self knows that's stalky and creepy and they should totally get a life.

When I was thirteen, living in Chicago with my mom and her boyfriend, I used to picture Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran perched on my fire escape like a cat, taking time out of his hectic world tour to stare into my window and watch the rise and fall of my torso, gazing in wonderment with his green British eyes at the sheer miracle of my existence. I walked the halls of Sacred Heart High School, my kilt swinging slowly around my kneecaps, picturing him always there, always fascinated, pining for me the same way I pined for him. (Did you know I went to Catholic school?)


I don't know what I did with myself when I wasn't infatuated with some British pop star or mortal boy from another school. Maybe I did my school work. Crushing was my default escape route from the painful realities of existence, a coping mechanism I'd used since I had my first crush on Shaun Cassidy when I was five. My crushes consumed me to the point of making me feel like I barely existed in the real world, which felt ghostly good at first.

But ultimately it was terrible thing, because the fantasy eventually cracked for one reason or another, leaving me exposed to the reality of unrequited affection. It was like being dragged out of a warm bed and plunged into a tub full of ice in the middle of January. But soon after one obsession had ebbed, another one would rush in to fill its spot, and I'd go through the highs and the lows again. And again and again.

Some things you never learn.

So I spent the day in bed yesterday, infatuated. But not with a person. With a book. A book that the cocktail party judge looks down her nose at because it's too easy to read, too simplistic, too cliche... But it hooked me the way books do sometimes. The way Interview with a Vampire hooked me when I was a teenager. And The Talisman. And Go Ask Alice. The kind of book you take into the bathroom with you EVERY time. The kind of book you stay up past your bedtime for. The kind of book you don't lend.

The book chronicles infatuation the same way I have lived it, right down to the spy in the night watching the young girl sleep, but instead of the spy being the protagonist's wish, he's really doing it. I am eating this up. At forty-one, maybe it should be more shocking that the feelings are still the same - fiery, agonizing, consuming. You've probably already read the book. It came out in 2005. It's Twilight. I didn't know I liked vampire stories so much, but now looking back on my past obsessions, my Lestat phase, my Nosferatu and Dracula moments, I see that I do. I see that I am also five years late to the table with this adoration. That's just the way I roll. It took me years, for instance, to fall in love with the Spice Girls.

Ahem.

What Stephenie Meyer is doing for me with this book is to show me that there is more room for me as a writer than I allow. I keep my boundaries so narrow when I think about what to write, and that's good to know. Not every story needs to be so insufferably plausible. I'm not even talking about writing a vampire story, though it sounds like loads of fun I admit. But the way she gives her heroine (and herself!) the pleasure of living out the fantasies we have during infatuation. It blows me away that I didn't consider it myself, coming from such obsessive ilk. This is all to say, the CPJ would be much happier with me if I'd written Twilight instead of kissing it like I did yesterday, under the covers in bed, away from the chaos and hubbub.

But she will just have to be unhappy while I lay in bed, lapping it up.

Sigh.