Second Chance Books

by Carina Gaskell

After all, bookstores have always been my refuge from reality. When times got tough, I could always wander into a bookstore, inspect the shelves, and remind myself that there is always some place I can run off to, even just for a while. Even if it’s between the pages of a book.

Besides, good or bad, every book has an end. Happiness might not be permanent, but the pain won’t last forever, either.

When the sun comes up, you get a new chance to make things right. To apologize. To be brave.

I believe that certain things happen to us that mold us into the person we’re meant to become. A trial by fire that results in a rebirth, a phoenix rising from the ashes.

My circumstance has robbed me of the luxury of choice.

poring over a textbook,

“Sorry. It’s a Filipino word. It’s like... the giddiness or the exhilaration you feel from a romantic experience. Like, the hand scene in Keira Knightley’s Pride and Prejudice.”

I let him go through my notes from watching K-dramas and other rom-coms and even Studio Ghibli films.

I’m there purely to study Miyazaki’s storytelling skills and nothing more.

We watch 10 Things I Hate About You and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, both classics which happen to have the number 10 in them.

“But don’t just listen to speak. Listen to understand. Too many people fall into the trap of just waiting for the other person to finish speaking so they can reply. Like, yes, it’s important to be quick and to be witty, but the whole point is to get to know the other person, you know? And obviously to let the other person get to know you, so just be yourself.”

“Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros,

“All I know,” he said, “are two things. One is that love’s given freely, not earned. And two: love is not without its risks, but it is always worth it.”

That’s that. Next time I fall in love, we don’t need to get the government involved.

But when you’re young and a girl, you’re taught to hate each other, to view each other as competition, and I confused my admiration and love for her brilliantness as hatred for a very long time.

there were so many books in the world and so little time.

“So many stories, so many lives I won’t get to live.”

I had the bad habit, you see, of withdrawing from life whenever I got upset.

seem to have developed the habit of speaking before thinking it through.

She’d look at me with disappointment in her eyes as if my weight was a moral failure and go, “You know, when I was your age...”

“Men don’t give a shit about you if they’re not even remotely interested in fucking you. You don’t exist to any of them if your existence is unattractive to them.”

times, yes, where I still ache. I yearn. But I tell myself this: is it not a sign of insanity to want the very thing you know you can never have?

I get my romantic fix through fiction where it’s safe to explore anything and everything without incurring any more personal trauma than I probably already have.

Sometimes we live with something for so long that we forget it’s there.