A Minute of Reflection (This is what books do to me)

#NowPlaying: I Miss You- Blink 182

Dear Friend,

  As I'm currently listening to nostalgic songs from my childhood and finishing up the last one hundred pages of John Green's Paper Towns. I can't help but take a moment of silence and think those ever-so-deep thoughts about life. About everything. About us and how we live our lives. (If you know me well enough, you'd know that this always happens when I read John Green books).

  I'm not gonna spoil anything except for the given fact that the once called Margo Roth Spiegelman is one magnificently adventurous, slightly crazy, eccentric girl. She was like the queen bee in her world of high school. And Q here (here old childhood best friend) is taken into whirlwind, night-long adventure of a lifetime when she appears in his bedroom asking him to tag along while she goes exacting some revenge. Albeit confused, Q does it anyway. After a night's worth of breaking, entering and 'breaking and entering' (yup, there's a difference), he finds himself spellbound by her. But all goes sour when Margo goes missing the next day. Q soon learns that she had left clues and they were left for him. As he deciphers what was left of Margo, he soon learns that Margo isn't the girl he thought he knew. He is left questioning, 'Who is the real Margo?'...

  Pretty cool summary/ description thingy right? Like the back of a book kind of stuff. That's the most I could say since I hate being a 'spoiler' (I usually am though). But, to be really honest, I didn't really read this book 'til last night.I got this one along with the rest of other four JG novels in a box set. And although I read Looking For Alaska in less than 24 hrs; like The Fault In Our Stars, I only read a couple of pages then sit it out and barely touched the book until I was terribly bored. But, last night, (yes, I was bored) something in me made me want to read it. Now, I'm glad I did. The story just kept on getting better and better as I flipped through the pages. And, like every other J. Green book I've read, I'm left questioning  life itself all over again...

  There's so many fine points to tackle, really.

  I guess foremost, I'd like to say that I am completely in love with the many euphemisms in this book: paper  relating to being fake, or unreal (I'm assuming, at least). the grass as... well, everything: from life, to death, to equality. Even the detective's comparison of balloon to people. I was all so vibrantly fascinating. I'm somewhat happy that I got to pick up on those (I'm pretty slow-minded sometimes)  and to this that one things could mean so many other things is just an awesome thought.  

  Second, I love Radar's (aka Q's best friend's) point when Q was mad at Ben. He said something like, "You know what your problem is? You keep expecting people not to be themselves". This hit me just as hard a lightning bolt would. Sometimes I too act like Q, getting pissed when people don't think the same as me. But ultimately, we just have to accept that that's how it goes in life. We're all blades of grass in a field. We cannot hate people for being themselves. I mean, I could hate this friend for being obsessed with how she looks around guy, for being kind of a (excuse the language) whore, or this other friend for being a control-freak or the other for never asking me to hangout. BUT I WONT. 'Cause in the end, they're my friends. I like them because they're funny, supportive, and they're pretty darn cool. We just have to accept. That's the best thing to do.

  Lastly, Margo. Q made her up to be some adventure or a miracle, or something spectacular or invincible. But somewhere in the middle, he figures out that Margo is just a girl. Him and his friends are opened up to new things about Margo that they didn't know. They would always say 'that's so un-Margo' but ultimately knowing that they're basing it off of the fragments of Margo that know so little about. If it is even the real Margo herself. In short, most people aren't what we think them out to be. And a specific person isn't that same person to everyone else (you see what I'm saying?). Me, for example: I may be this quite, shy girl to most people, but to my friends I am this random, reckless girl who is somewhat suicidal and who tends be all 'fangirly at times'. But really, what do those friends of mine know? Maybe that isn't the real Yasmeen. Maybe what they know about me isn't who I really am. Think about it, what do you really know about me? Or about any of your friends for that matter. How do you know that we're all not made of paper?

  Sigh. Because, in reality, sometimes I don't know who I really am anymore. I play different parts everyday, never firmly grasping to accept me for what I am. I'm really confused right now, because even I don't know if I'm a paper girl in a town full of paper people. I bet I am.

  To end this very long, more-than-a-minute refection, I'll say this: "What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person."- John Green, Paper Towns. We are nothing more than people. Our lives aren't as magnificent as we always make them out to be. I'd like to compare is to quote/fact about mirrors: "We are ten times prettier as we look back in a mirror than we are in real life". We. are. not. spectacular. But we've all got something unique in our lives. Maybe it's because we're all special that, for the same reason, we aren't special at all.  

  I better read the rest of the book.

Love Always,
Yasmeen