When I first noted the intricacies of literature, I fell in love with the characters I was reading about - their sorrows, their pain, their injustices, their happiness, their love. I got lost in the lives of Hardy's Tess and Jude, Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, Shakespeare's Lear, Claudio and Hero, and Beatrice and Benedict. The point being that I love to read about the intricacies of the Victorian period or the Mid-19th Century or even the Elizabethan Era. The writing expressed in these works is an art reserved for those whose imagination exceeds bounds and highlights the base happenings of the day-to-day to present characters worth reading about and fighting for or against. I've always wanted to be able to showcase a literary prowess worth reading for enjoyment or an indepth criticism or analysis. I've dreamt about the day I'd finally be able to capture the attention of an audience, no matter how big or small, with my words, my writing, my story.

And then I realized that, in a sense, I have already accomplished this feat. While my audience is small, it appears to be a collection of people who see my story as a little sip of The Truth About Coffee. Do I have more that I would like to say? Absolutely. Is it at times hard to find the right words to say without leaning toward a culture of offense or even just merely relatablility? Without a doubt, and these fail safes will always guard the words that flow from the tips of my fingers.

And yet, I am not deterred from this goal - of creating a work that twists the common tropes and highlights the difficulties of the world we live in. I've grown up in a time where political powers divide the people they are supposed to unite, where voices manipulate certain truths, where people feel as if they are owed something for nothing, where ideals are placed on a pedastal and reality is left to grovel at the plinth. Our time is drastically different in some respects from the contents of literary greats, but I would argue that the reason we still gravitate toward these sorrows, pain, injustices, happiness, and love is because they bleed throughout history and unite us. We can see the patterns appear in rare form across eras to present the modernality of the issues that make literature one of the most fruitful subjects.

This is another one of the reasons for my profession. I find such pleasure in showing students that the types of characters we analyze share a lot of the characteristics we ourselves at times emulate: pride, grief, heartbreak, misunderstanding, entitlement, joy, pain, etc. When I had more time to read for pleasure, I described myself as a hopeless romantic. I loved reading love stories, falling victim to the fairytale culture presented in these stories ... the happily ever after. It is a literature major's fatal flaw - accepting the seemily unrealistic love of our favorite characters while searching for that same ending in our own lives. And, I know this because it was almost my downfall.

I hid myself in my little shell - behind the great loves: Romeo and Juliet, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley, Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska. I then searched for a great love myself, or at least the sembance of one, a little taste. That was the great obstacle in my quest - searching. You see, they always tell you that love comes to those who wait, yet I was impatient.

Unnoticed in my teen years, I searched when I reached a certain point in college. In this search, I realized that I was holding these men to unrealistic ideals, to the codes of others' literary prowess. How could I find love if my checklist was created primarily by men (shout out to Edith Wharton for Archer and Olenska in The Age of Innocence)? How could I find love at all with a checklist, even if it was mine own? I couldn't.

Love is not a quest; it enters the room when you least expect it. It makes your heart flutter and your skin flush. It shows you that a checklist is arbitrary because it exceeds all bounds. Love entered my life at a time when a career came knocking. I accepted a job and fell in love at around the same time, which by proxy inserted 313 miles between us. While this has been difficult, I have found that it has strengthened my faith and assured me that everything will work itself out, which for someone as anxious as myself, is a necessity.

In this year alone, I have felt so much love that even this does not do it justice. But, what I have learned is that even though literature seemed to have made me a hopeless romantic, I am now the most hopeful, and yes, literature still plays a huge role. While 313 miles seems insignicant to most, it has made my life challenging, yet rewarding. And with only 113 more days until a fruitful and much needed summer vacation, I feel as if I might develop a bit more in my very own literary prowess. Until tomorrow ...