ari and dante,
i put off reading this one since i was in high school. book nerds were a community, this novel, was the talk of town.
i was kind of pretentious, still am, to refuse to consume anything being hyped up, refused to be swept up by the trends. i know it rings false, but that’s the way i lived til now, with my hypocrisy.
enough of that, this book had been sitting in my TBR for gods know how long. it’s been forever, ari and dante, cooped up in the margins of my memory. yes, ari’s line. fortunately, the novel had found its way to me again.
it felt a little too late to be reading this one. i wish i had read it as soon as i knew of it. i guess that’s one of the things i regret. it may sound dramatic, but i think reading this in high school might have saved me a little. it felt like i was intruding with the younger version of myself, as i was reading about ari and dante.
a part of me had probably read this with the mind of a highschooler, ari’s anger welling up inside him inconsolable and unknowable. i felt myself deeply resonating with the melancholia it brings ari. how confronting it is just as bad as running away from it, and, you would not know anything of what to do other than live between the itch of those two urges.
i liked how the novel tackled mostly the complexities of love, especially of those our parents’. they were grounded of their nature to love, which was one of the mysteries that ari and dante tries to solve. for ari, love was a weight, a pressure. for dante, it’s being himself in the world.
i kept wondering, what was this secret of the universe they have found? i thought of it as something, probably rhetorical. as i try to gauge it, it’s not that too hard to understand. it could be about learning the secrets of your parents that they have been keeping from you all your life, learning about the reason of unfathomable anger and loneliness you feel excavating you from the inside, or it could be, just as be, learning about the affections you have always had for someone and learning there is nothing more profound than learning you are deeply loved by everyone you care about. that is the only universe that matters. and it frees you.
i wanted to write more about ari, his transition from not understanding love, to completely accepting its characteristics, good and bad, the people around him and especially of himself. how he’s just as capable of realizing it. and it’s a weight just as much as it’s something that can make you feel light as a wind.
i love you, ari and dante.
you will be living in my head for quite a long time.
and i hope both your love will extend beyond the life you had given within the premises of this novel. it probably already did.
i am hopeful, and you make me.
As Dante and I lay on our backs in the bed of my pickup and gazed out at the summer stars, I was free. Imagine that. Aristotle Mendoza, a free man.
August 17, 2023
