Joy

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein

I flip through pages, breathing in the smell of old paper. Anne of Green Gables lies open in my lap, the title dressed in a fancy old font, bookmarks spilling out. I start reading and find myself at Green Gables, daydreaming in the meadow while Matthew plows the fields and Marilla gossips with Mrs. Lynde inside the yellow, wallpapered kitchen. I am the shadow of Anne. The trees she climbs and the flowers she names. Imaginative and overdramatic, just like her. I go where she goes. I make the mistakes she does. I don’t want to leave.

In the beginning, it was all chaos: a, b, c, and x. What were all these things?! What did they all mean? I hated finding the discriminant at first. Then I realized what it could do—the power it held. Without even graphing the parabola, I could tell if it would cross the axis, just graze it, or never touch it at all. Real or imaginary. I could see the answer before I got there. Seven days later, it finally clicked and everything made sense. I couldn’t stop smiling. It wasn’t the equation that changed. It was my perspective of it.

Anne was a tumult I couldn’t predict. Would she finally speak to Gilbert again? Apologize to Mrs. Lynde? The more I read, the more I understood. Not what she’d do next. But who she was and how she thought. I know Anne would have given the discriminant a name. Something like The Grand, Glorious, All-Knowing Decider. She’d probably capitalize it. And just like that, she wasn’t a mystery anymore. She was someone who needed big words for big ideas–except in my case, big equations for big ideas. She was someone like me.

That’s how my brain works. I dwell inside books, equations, and thoughts. I’ve read Anne of Green Gables at least seven times. I can’t let go. At lunch once, I couldn’t stop thinking about a question. I’d read it somewhere: Were we living inside someone else’s mind? I asked my friends. They shrugged it off. I couldn’t. I was still standing there. It was like how Anne feels real to me even though I know she’s fictional. That one never clicked. I didn’t care. I held on to it for hours anyway. They had to yell my name twice before I realized.

Sometimes, it can be exhausting. My friends move on and I’m still there, frustrated that my brain won’t let go. Once, one of my friends called me a weirdo. I kept talking anyway. Sometimes I keep the clicks to myself. But most times I don’t. Anne found her kindred spirits at Queen’s Academy. Maybe that can be my future too– a place that completes my square. Where people get it.