It doesn't hurt me/ Do you want to feel how it feels?

[dolorosa_12]

When I was younger, I used to thrust certain books upon people with urgency. I thought that if they read that book, they would understand everything there was to know about me, all I was and all I felt and thought and dreamed. I handed out copies of Pagan's Crusade, His Dark Materials, the Earthsea and Obernewtyn series, Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye,* the cringeworthy Cecilia Dart-Thornton books. I sat people down in front of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, clips of the Banquine act from Cirque du Soleil's Quidam, with tears in my eyes because they moved me so much, they articulated me so much. And of course, it didn't work. Maybe these people (my friends, my mother) liked some of the books, but they were never me, and they could never see exactly what it was that I saw there. No two people read the same book, and no person is able to crawl inside another's mind.

But I still do it. I still have a list of texts that I feel if a person just read, watched, listened to them with the proper mindset, they would know me completely. And they are:

The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras
The second chapter of Romanitas and the final two chapters of Savage City by sophiamcdougall
The entirety of the Pagan Chronicles series, including (unusually for most fans of the series) the fifth book
The first line of The King's Peace by Jo Walton
The song 'Blinding' by Florence + The Machine
The song 'Kino' by The Knife
The song 'Mezzanine' by Massive Attack
The episode 'Earshot' from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
catvalente's blog post My dinner with Persephone
Victor Kelleher's books Parkland, Earthsong and Fire Dancer

Not particularly complicated, really. Realistically, I know that it will never work for another person. No one else has my particular set of experiences or my particular personality. And if I have to explain why the combination of these things=me, I've failed. I just know that they are. I am.
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*A line of this book, 'Home was an age, not a place', has remained with me forever. It's been at least 13 years since I first read that book.