Lately, I’ve preferred reading long books. Finished Middlemarch. Almost done with Moby-Dick. Next up, perhaps Anna Karenina?

Each time I start a book, I tend towards dislike. It’s unfamiliar. A new world. A different syntax. Et cetera. A long book affords me the luxury of time — to ease in, to acclimate, and to stick around for a good while. As the familiarity develops, as the contours of the new world sharpen, as the different syntax begins to land smoothly on my cognitive processes, the book becomes an increasingly welcome presence in my life. And soon enough, I start longing for return to this little linguistic lovely nest of mine, a tiny but vast hideaway, tightly bound, and highly portable. Which makes finishing books such a terrible affair. Which is why it’s taken me as long to read the last three chapters of Moby-Dick as it took me to read the first fifty. Which is why I start reading other books instead of finishing those I’m close to finishing. Ergo, why I’m stalling on Moby-Dick with the help of Notes from Underground, The Good Terrorist, and The Left Hand of Darkness. You want proof about my attachment to long books? Here’s what I wrote in my journal, in June, when I finished Middlemarch:

I’m feeling a bit melancholy. At the risk of being dramatic, I’m sad I finished reading Middlemarch. It had kept me company for weeks, and it was good company. As I wrote yesterday, it helped me feel less lonely in my inward drama.

As long it remains unfinished, bits of that little, cozy, and known nest remain. Thus, the long book provides me a valuable surplus: that extra bit of time to rest before I must inevitably part, and it is within this pocket of time that I feel most tranquil.

I used to think I was great at goodbyes. And by great, I mean I could will myself to be unaffected. At least I thought I could. And I was pretty good at it, until I wasn’t. At some summer camp, many summers ago, this kid and I got close. We loved film. We bantered in Spanglish. So we got along. When the program ended, he cried because he was going to miss me, and I remember asking myself — what does that feel like? Some version of this moment has reoccurred at various different periods of my life. I moved so much when I was younger, and I’m still moving around, and the people I loved and love moved so much around me, and they’re still moving around, and each time it would shred my childish heart. So, determined to protect my young and stunted heart, I decided to blunt my emotions. At least then, the pain wouldn’t be so sharp. But that protection can come at a cost. What I would learn many years later, when my heart was no longer a bleeding child’s heart but the frail one of an anxious adult, is that it also disconnected me from my self, and could be experienced by those who cherished me as a fierce wall between them and me.

Anyways, I’m not trying so hard, at least not like I once did, to protect myself from pain. And goodbyes are much harder for me than they used to be. But I also feel less disconnected from my self, and despite sometimes wishing that it was a coldly logical and purely rational soul, I’ve come to accept it’s inexorably messy and knotty and pasted with emotions — in short, entirely human. Now, how do I connect this to my lately bias for long books? I don’t really know. It’s going to be a stretch. Let me try. If I come off trite or clichéd, don’t hold it against me. Phew, here goes: I got so used to goodbyes; I want to restore that young little heart that would get easily broken; maybe long books are a way to practice sticking with something that requires commitment and to practice accepting that all stories, whether they be on pages, or whether they be in life, and no matter how long, eventually end; and, it’s not bad to let that fact bruise or tear or crack your heart. Which is all to say, soon enough, I’ll have to finish Moby-Dick.