Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

You know those books that just have so many moments you have to write down? When I read Love in the Time of Cholera in 2016 I could have filled an entire commonplace book with lines of meaning. Over 300 pages of "oofs", "woahs", "ahhs" and "mmmms".

I would describe this novel, or my experience of it, as a novel of transportation. The kind of book that takes you from wherever you are and transports you to an entirely different space or feeling. It's not that reading it transplanted me into the Caribbean, specifically, but reading it had such an impact on my nervous system that you'd be hard pressed to convince me I wasn't doing so off the coast of somewhere hot and beautiful. I read this book in the dead of Winnipeg winter but while reading it, my body was enveloped in soft and gentle warmth.

This book was also an escape. I read it while in the throes of a deeply toxic and dysfunctional relationship. Dropping into this novel meant that I could turn off and get away from a particular phase of increasingly harmful dynamics. Also, she hated reading (...right) and hated when I read (wtfff) because it felt "disconnecting". My capacity for engaging in healthy conflict has grown significantly since then, but in that time, turning to reading as a passive stance against certain abuse was often all I had to protect myself.

This novel tells the story of an enduring love. Of being smacked in the face of reality, having to reckon with it, learning and growing from it, and still finding ways to be in connection and in relationship. My longing for and investment in the lives and loves of Fermina and Florentino existed as an indication of what actually might be possible. A hint that, perhaps, the relationship within which I was existing was not where I should be. That it was not sustainable, not enduring, not love. It took a minute (there's a statistic out there somewhere about how it takes 7 tries to leave an abusive relationship), but Love in the Time of Cholera was absolutely a stepping stone towards my salvation.

And so this is a book that changed me. And maybe saved me? We as writers should all be so lucky as to have this kind of impact on a receiver of our work at least once. This book is why I believe that everything we write - every line, every word - matters. There is no such thing as a throw away, in my opinion. For sure, if this had been a book containing "whatever" moments, it would not have made this kind of difference in my life. Every thing we write matters and it matters that we write. Since reading this book, my revising process (Up to this point in my writing career this has largely been done with plays, but I look forward to applying this same "zoom-in" exercise to future poetry revising processes) has involved a period of really working inside of the text, rather than outside of it. Going through the text, line by line, living inside of the moments, lines, dialogue, exchanges etc, and ensuring that everything said and done is reaching its maximum potential.

Márquez' writing does this - every line is epic and every moment is a novel unto itself.

Here are some of those aforementioned bangers:

- It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

- He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

- That was always the case: any event, good or bad, had some relationship to her.

- And so the most difficult hours passed for him, at times in the person of a timid prince or a paladin of love, at other times in his own scalded hide of a lover in the middle of forgetting, until the first breezes began to blow and he went to doze in the lounge chairs by the railing.

- "You have to know languages when you go to sell something," she said with mocking laughter. "But when you go to buy, everyone does what he must to understand you."

- Moreover, a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. On the contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.

- His uncle was angry with him because of the manner in which he had thrown away the good position of telegraph operator in Villa de Levya, but he allowed himself to be swayed by his convictions that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

- "Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no."

- "The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love."

- With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

- “Do you mean what you say?” he asked. / “From the moment I was born,” said Florentino Ariza, “I have never said anything I did not mean.” / The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits. / “And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked. / Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights. “Forever,” he said.