I didn’t know what I was walking into when my cousin and I entered the cinema to watch Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight weeks ago. I hadn’t read about it, and knew only that it was a love story about 20 years below our age bracket. That didn’t stop us, of course. After I watched it, though, I nearly went nuts trying to find a copy of the book that was, to my horror, out of stock everywhere. I told myself, there must be something more to this film than what was on screen. It was because I couldn’t fully understand Edward Cullen’s reactions.
In my search for the Twilight book, I ended up finding instead the unfinished copy of Midnight Sun in Stephenie Meyer’s website – Twilight in the eyes of Edward. I was stupefied. Here was Edward revealed, his thoughts, his struggles, his anguish, his pain. I suddenly understood why he seemed to be so torn whenever he drew near Bella, and the reason why he said he no longer had the strength to stay away from her.
Love, against all reason.
That, I understood. You don’t really have to be 17 to be caught up in Twilight. It brought back memories for me: of high-speed drives in anger, of mountain hikes amid the mist, of conversations – endless conversations, of laughter in the rain, of sand dunes and beaches at dusk, of coming together from different worlds and deciding, with finality.
The book is unfinished, though, and I’m not sure if Stephenie will ever finish it. I hope she does. I want to read what the last chapters were like for Edward. His torment must have been staggering, yet he broke through all that with Bella. He overcame.
That’s more than I can say for the rest of us humans.
