Les Misérables

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

I was 15 and I was in London. I dug my fingers into my striped pink sweater, nervously fidgeting. My mother sat next to me, texting furiously. I spared a thought for my sisters and my father (they had opted to watch Wicked instead). The lights dimmed and I filched her phone away, stowing it in the pocket of my jeans. "It's starting," I murmured placatingly.

Thus began the conflicted torture.

It was unlike anything else I'd ever experienced.

(That very year, a few months before, someone had showed me a DVD of Les Misérables being performed. I was mesmerised. From then onwards I began a passionate affair with Victor Hugo. I devoured his works, I obsessed over his quotes, I sang the musical score for the contraltos beneath my breath.

When my father asked me if I wanted to watch any musicals, I fairly leaped at the opportunity. Les Misérables! In London!)

From the beginning to end, I was suffocating from my emotions. Never one easily moved to tears, I found drops making their way down my face from the very start. I found my knuckles turning white with the force of my grip on the armrests as Eponine died (the tragedy of all the tragedies).

When it was over, my mother turned her red-rimmed eyes towards mine. "I didn't expect that," she admitted.

I had read the book and watched a few performances on DVDs beforehand but even then I took her hand in mine and quietly said, "Me too."

“Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it."
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--
"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables