seventeen
She found solace in words. Her own words, for once.
Reading other’s words, whether it was Violet Lavinia’s horrifyingly indulgent ‘vampyre’ penny dreadfuls, her father’s beloved Shakespeare leather-bound tomes, or even Byron’s exquisite poetry, was her perpetual comfort. She loved losing herself in books for hours, always had, but nothing could ever compare to creating her own worlds.
Reading helped her escape, but writing grounded her. In the morning, she took care of her brother’s estate, and in the evenings she wrote, forgetting to eat, sometimes until dawn, her fingers stained by ink, her head drooping against the quill.
She found herself in words.
No one knew she wrote them—no one but herself. She kept them like a treasure. She kept them from the world.
And at least twice a week, she followed Beth’s example.
She fed her own faith, to make it grow.
The Scriptures were filled with stories of war and romance, love and adventure, delving deeply into the psyche of things. Who knew? These were not the oversimplified moralistic stories or the wooden people she had been preached from the pulpit. Here was good reading to be had—studying even. She looked up the original text in Greek, whichever parts she could follow. She read, she grew.
She found Beth’s faith, and it became her own.
She kept exploring, and the more she sought, the more she found. Truth, love, strength. And as she grew stronger in her mind and in her heart, she wrote more maturely. The hopelessness abated, the darkness withdrew.
And in came light, light, to chase away the black night.
Night after night, Jo poured her changing heart into her letters to Beth, and as she wrote, she felt her soul expanding, as if to make space for the wonders she kept discovering in the old family Bible. Who would have thought this wasn’t merely an old, dusty book in which to jot down the dates of the children’s births?
It was stories. Heroes and heroines, with weaknesses and flaws like her, that fought in battles and led armies. Stories of great loss and great victories. And the kind of gentleness she had not read about in any book so far, let alone experienced in real life. She saw herself in them: she saw who she was, and who she had been. She saw who she wanted to be.
She read on. She wrote on. She ‘chose the good portion’, just like Mary from the painting. Just as Beth had.
It was so simple to make the decision to change her heart, to uproot the bitterness from the foil of her heart and plant gratitude instead. It had seemed impossible before, and it was indeed incredibly hard now. It was a painstaking process that would take a great deal of time, her whole life even.
But it was possible. She had never known that before. Changing was possible. Becoming.
Finally, Jo knew what she had to do in order to change.
And that meant the world to her.
It was quite literally, everything.
Dear Beth,
I keep thinking about Justin.
Where is he? Is anyone looking after him?
Even though he is older than me, I can’t stop worrying about him. That boy has not had enough fussing over him, if you ask me. The time for that was when he was a child, and that’s long gone.
The day he had been sent away to school, he was fighting back tears, but hid them. That was the last time I saw any human emotion on his handsome face. He’s been made of stone ever since. I, on the other hand, was weeping openly, inconsolable. He had been my only companion, in a house full of sisters.
Laurie found me crying under a tree.
“I am here,”
he said simply, and back then, he was a poor substitute for a brother. But oh, how he filled the gaping void in my heart in the coming months.
‘I. Am. Not. Your. Brother.’
His words from that night will forever echo in my
Laurie held me as I cried, even though he was too young to know how to console another human being and had never been consoled himself, although he had lost so much. But he knew how to be kind out of pure instinct.
‘You are not alone,’ he kept telling me.
Of course, I had you three back then, so I would never be alone, would I? Well, not ‘never’, but not for a long time yet. But Laurie understood my need for passion and adventure like no one else could. Whenever I was not spending time with you three, Laurie would abandon his own lessons and come keep me company. He lent me his books on Ancient Greek and taught me mathematics. He let me fence with him, and taught me how to ride a horse astride.
When he met Aunt March for the first time, he whispered in my ear:
‘Aunts should never have been invented.’
A bubble of laughter escaped me, and Papa sent me to my room without any dinner, but I didn’t mind. I still laugh whenever I remember this phrase. It was a welcome change after all of aunt’s remarks anyway:
‘You are not ladylike, Josephine. Mind your manners, Josephine. You talk too much, Josephine. Your fingers are once again black with ink, Josephine. No one shall want to marry you, Josephine. You forget your place, Josephine.’
After she left, Laurie started calling me ‘Jo’, and that was the first time I loved hearing my name on someone’s lips. He did not speak it with disappointment or disapproval.
With him, I was not ‘Josephine’, but merely ‘Jo’.
‘Jo’ could write and run and laugh and was never told to stop talking. ‘Jo’ could never disappoint, because I was only ever ‘Jo’ with him. And he accepted every single part of me.
I could exist as ‘Jo’.
I could breathe as ‘Jo’.
Pretty soon, I was ‘Jo’ to everyone else as well.
Laurie did that for me.
Laurie created a place for me in a world that had rejected me.
And in losing him, I wonder if I have lost that as well.
I wonder if my only place in this world was by his side.
Eternally,
Your sister.