The Book Nook

15

 I wasted time roaming the aisles, slowly looking over each shelf as if I was very much trying to find something that stood out, even though I was completely glazing over all the books entirely, not even registering the titles on the spines.

In my mind I have attempted to make the equivalent of a writer's bulletin board, putting each separate scene of Alexandria's book on to its own piece of paper and tacking it up on to the board so I am met with a giant collage of different colored squares. This is how I plan on sifting through and sorting out the fiction from reality. My intuition tells me that every bit of her book is laced with fiction but extends from her reality. I believe that what clever, little Alex has done is take the largest, most prevalent themes in her life and turned them into tangible situations, evoking an almost magical realism into her world and creating problems for her "character" that stem from the roots of her own anxieties and insecurities.

Yes, that's quite a hefty conclusion, ripe enough to sit down and pen an entire academic essay on.

From that conversation in the pub I understood so much more and, seemingly, the more I learn, the more her book makes sense.

Going back to those scenes I pondered over before, I recalled the part in which she relives a couple childhood memories via dream, but with the addition of an unknown person in the scenes that she never remembered being there. She then relives those same scenes but from the viewpoint of the additional unknown person. The last line of that chapter chills me.

A strange woman visited my Dad twelve years ago. Tonight I found out that I mightʼve been that strange woman.

And that scene doesn't even crack the top ten of strange things that happen to her in her book.

Since Alexandria had revealed to me that her father had passed away and it left her family with immeasurable grief, it comes as no surprise that her father appears sporadically in her book. It's obvious to me now that she wishes she could go back just to speak to him one more time. The significance of those scenes pulverize my heart.

In the dream, I am sitting in a chair talking to my Dad about what I have done with my life. Though he looks at least a decade younger, he seems happier than usual and very interested in the things that I am saying. I remember him asking about what I am doing and where Iʼm living, and remember him saying he was happy that things were going so good for me.

I recognize where I am. Iʼm sitting in the chair in the living room of our old house. I look at him again. He tells me I've grown into such a beautiful, mature woman and I fall to pieces.

There are times in her book where I'm convinced I am reading a memoir but then just when I think it is settling down into normalcy and she is merely recounting incidents and events out of her real life - which I'm sure very much are - something in her book always happens that comes along and throws me for a loop.

Just a few incidents that "character Alex" has happen to her up to where I am in the novel:

Several of her dreams begin coming true within one to two days of having said dream. One of which predicted a girl's death. A girl whom Alex even knew.Two homeless people, on separate occasions, about a week or so apart, walk up to her and tell her that she is a Pisces - which is true - and the second one also adds that she is about to 'become aligned with the universe'. Another dream. An odd one. The plotline of the dream isn't important, but at the end of the dream she gets into an airplane and goes back to the beginning of the dream, experiencing the whole dream over again as a continuous loop until eventually waking after several circles through. This recurred multiple nights.Yet another dream. Increasingly odder. She's with her family as they are currently - her, her mother, brother and sister. They are trying to get to a family Christmas dinner, running late and, on their way, slide off a bridge and plunge through the ice into the river below. Suddenly, they are driving again with the bridge behind them as if nothing ever happened. When they get to the family dinner, the only relatives there are the ones Alex knows who have passed away, including her father. Every living relative, however, is there too but they are all in the next room 'sleeping' because they have not passed on to the next life yet.She believes she has an experience of Divine Intervention one night while bicycling home alone, almost getting hit by a bus but realizing she is already on the other side of the street, having no memory of moving so fast. She works her way through the necessary people to view the footage from the camera at the top of the streetlights that view that intersection. What she sees from that night on the television is a glowing figure appear beside her right before the bus should have made impact and a split-second later the onscreen Alex is safely on the sidewalk with the glowing figure releasing her from its (wings?).Another dream. A dream of a church that she did not recognize. Much later on, when the dream is long forgotten about, while she is driving across the country on a one-woman road trip, in the middle of nowhere she passes the very church from her dream. Screeching to a halt and pulling to the side of the road, she is hit by the recognition of it and the remembrance of that dream coming flooding back. She gets out of the car, walks up towards the church and suddenly falls backward with the power of an unknown force. She wakes up to the church's minister kneeling over her to help. He speaks a mysterious prophecy over her before sending her back on her way. "For you, dear child, can see what others cannot, can know what others cannot know, and can speak for others what they cannot already think."Eventually she visits a therapist whom tells her "there is coincidence and then there is meaningful coincidence, synchronicity. You are experiencing a lot of it and it means your life right now is at a crossroads of some sort whether you know it or not. The decisions you make are extra important. You'll want to be extra aware of what is going on around you and especially within you, and watch your dreams for clues. The build-up might be to something more positive for you, but you also might pass over the opportunity if you fear what is ahead. Fear stops you dead in your tracks. So embrace whatever is coming for you as if it is everything you've ever wanted, and you will create a future for yourself that lives your dreams."