By Stella Konstantopoulou
If someone were to ask me to write a book about my life, I’d shake my head, laugh and have little to no clue as to where to start, or whether I’d even want to make a start at it at all. I like to think of peoples’ lives as small, little pebbles found in the eternal line that is the sand of the sea; despite their colour or size, each pebble becomes heavy and yet light, firm and synchronously soft once you hold it in your palm. The harshness of the rock mingles with the soft running of the sand you hold in your hand; a metaphor of life’s cold and harsh winds that tend to hit you on the face in such unexpected, and more often than not undeserving ways. The winds that become bearable once you remember the way that closing your eyes makes it just a tiny bit more bearable, the minutes that tick by just a heartbeat faster if you let yourself swallow the knowledge that counting to ten backwards may help you relish in the cold, remembering that snowflakes can be beautiful too. Just like the sand drifting off your fingers like a running horse trying to win a race, you are once again reminded that you, just like the horse and the sand, are trying to win a surely lost battle, the battle of time, or maybe the battle that is life. You slide down the memory lane of life and write unceasingly, just like the sand briefly kissing your skin before falling again to the grounds, the grounds it always belonged to.
If, let’s say now, a person came up to me and asked me, out of the blue, to give my own pebble a single colour, I would once again hesitate, afraid of tripping on my own tongue, afraid of permanently painting my life a colour unsuited to it, of giving it no justice through the mixture of the wrong palette. That is the very reason, I suppose, why I have come to admire all those writers that let their pens turn from blue to autobiographical, and from black ink being able to cast a grey, almost blackish, shadow that embodied their line of life, becoming in 300, 400 or even 672 pages the representative of their memories, of their days and nights for reading generations to come.
From The Lives of Others to Amir’s Blue Elephant, let each and every single one of our authors take you on a time-travel trip back to the days hidden inside their books’ pages. After all, life might indeed serve as a source of inspiration, having led many great writers to writing their own respective gems, but for some of us there is little life found in actual life itself without writing, without books.
“All we have is words, all we have is worlds.”
