“You want to call the story ‘Plot Twist’?” I questioned, looking up from the television and tilting my head at her.
She looked over her laptop at me, suddenly smirking at the sight of my face, “Oh no. Absolutely fuck off, I can feel the judgement from here!”.
“Well… it ruins it a bit, doesn’t it? The reader will know it’s coming! Like, surely, if you read a collection of stories… let’s say… for a competition, and the theme was ‘plot twists’, you wouldn’t be impressed. You’d just be waiting for the twist to come.”
“Fuck off… you are absolutely right”
I laughed out loud as she hid her face behind her hands, grinning, embarrassed. It’s a smile that had never failed to make me melt, that made every romantic cliche reasonable, one that made Valentines Day like Christmas. Her two front teeth had this small gap between them and she hated it, but she was something stunning to me. And her writing was excellent, even when she fell short with the title. She wrote about adventure and danger and amazing, intricate worlds. She created these incredible characters full of heartache and passion and I know I love them because each of them, in some way, are crafted from parts of her. She took her own pain and made poem out of story. And even though she wasn’t a princess fighting a dragon to save her kingdom, or a demigod taking on every deity in the Heavens, like the heroines of her stories, she’s was as strong as every one of them too. Even sat there in her pajamas and fluffy socks on my sofa, where she’d been all day.
I don’t know why it’s that memory that always returns to me, fragmented and rose tinted and wonderful, but it is.
Sometimes, I sit there with her most recent book on my lap. Open to the third page.
Dedicated to Nadia, my best friend and loyal sidekick. You inspire me.
The book was a bestseller for weeks. Thousand of copies across the globe bought, thousands of eyes scanning over that little dedication. To me. For me.
The princess dies in this one. Plot twist!
Oh God, I should have seen it coming.
It was so obvious. Maybe I could have done something. Maybe I could have been there.
I should have seen it coming.
Novel Dreamers 