Reading at the Lake | Teen Ink

Reading at the Lake MAG

January 26, 2013
By Afanen PLATINUM, Santa Rosa, California
Afanen PLATINUM, Santa Rosa, California
49 articles 0 photos 47 comments

Favorite Quote:
"But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."


- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time


I went to read a book by the lake at 2:18 this afternoon, because I'd lied about needing to be somewhere at 2:30, and I needed a place to go. So I went. I bent the front cover back, so no passersby could see the uncircumcised man on the front, because it was Yehuda Amichai, who knows lapsed Jewry better than anyone but me and all the other children of the Diaspora. I was clumsy with the cover, because the wind was cold, and my fingers were cold, and the deserts from the pages did their jobs too well. The other walkers would sometimes glance at me lying on my front on the bench, my left leg crooked so the spots where the cartilage is strange don't throb and whine. I looked back at them, sometimes, from behind my backlit fringe, because I wanted to see what they thought of a young girl reading a book with a bent-back cover and her feet in the air, and not have them see me. Everything's a performance. I won't remember the people I looked at tomorrow, when my fingers have thawed out, and I wonder if I should have attended services yesterday, and the patch of mud behind my knee has rubbed off, but maybe one of the people who looked at me will remember a young girl, hiding the front of her book with her hand, looking at them through a veil of hair. And hey, I have this poem.



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This article has 2 comments.


on Dec. 10 2014 at 2:02 am
Asharita BRONZE, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, Other
4 articles 0 photos 1 comment

Favorite Quote:
Spero Spera; There is hope where there is life.

....Whoa. Long... O.O b

Mckay ELITE said...
on Oct. 8 2013 at 5:32 pm
Mckay ELITE, Somewhere, Virginia
146 articles 0 photos 2230 comments

Favorite Quote:
"The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997
“Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn't understood.”
― Weihui Zhou

Absolutely stunning. 5/5