There are stories I know the ending of and still return to. Not because I have forgotten what happens. Perhaps because I haven’t.
I know when the music will swell. I know when the room will go quiet. I know which sentence will arrive before I reach it, and which character is about to make the mistake I wish they wouldn’t. And still, I press play. I open the book again.
There is something slightly absurd about this. We spend most of our lives trying not to repeat what hurts us. We call it growth when we learn not to make the same mistake twice. Yet with stories we do the opposite. We return to the heartbreak voluntarily.
I have done this with Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, with a boy who wanted to become a musician so badly that he seemed to confuse suffering with becoming an artist.
The first time, I watched Janardhan as though the film were about love. About the boy who became inseparable from his music, his anger, his becoming. When I watched it again, I found myself looking elsewhere. At the boy before the fame. At the hunger underneath the rebellion. At the strange loneliness of getting exactly what you once thought would save you and discovering that it doesn’t.
There is a moment when the demand for one’s own life turns into a battle cry, “sadda haq, aithe rakh”, written by Irshad Kamil, sung by Mohit Chauhan, composed by A.R. Rahman. Give me what is mine. It sounds liberating. But wanting your life back and knowing what to do with it once you have it are two very different things.
The first time, I wanted to understand him. The second time, I wanted to understand why he couldn’t save himself.
Maybe that is what happens when we revisit a story. The characters remain where we left them. We don’t.
Books can be crueller in this way.
I returned to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, to a love so consuming that Catherine can say of Heathcliff, with complete conviction, that he is more herself than she is. It is one of those sentences that can make you mistake recognition for romance. There is something intoxicating about the idea of finding another person and recognising yourself so completely in them that the boundary between me and you begins to dissolve.
The first time, perhaps, you read it as devotion. The second time, you begin to wonder whether disappearing into another person is devotion at all.
That is the peculiar cruelty of rereading. The book doesn’t become wiser. You do. Or at least, you hope you do.
Catherine and Heathcliff go on loving each other with the same ferocity. They go on hurting each other. Their choices remain terrible and beautiful and selfish and devastating in almost equal measure. But you arrive carrying different experiences. You have loved differently. Lost differently. Perhaps you have stayed somewhere you should have left. Perhaps you have wanted someone so badly that the wanting began to feel like proof that they belonged to you.
And suddenly the same sentence means something else.
Maybe that is why certain books become dangerous companions. They don’t simply tell us who the characters are. They give us language for the parts of ourselves we hadn’t learned how to name yet.
I think this is why we return to stories that hurt. We are not always returning for the story. Sometimes we are returning for ourselves.
A film watched at nineteen does not meet the same person when watched at twenty-six. A book read before heartbreak is not the same book after it. The pages haven’t changed. The scenes haven’t changed. But the person sitting on the other side of them has.
A character you once defended becomes someone you no longer understand. A line you once thought was romantic begins to sound frightening. A character you once judged begins to make a little more sense. Sometimes the opposite happens. You realise you were right the first time, you just didn’t yet have the vocabulary to explain why.
Stories are strange little time capsules like that. They preserve us without asking permission. We remember not only what happened in them, but who we were when we encountered them. It is why certain films feel impossible to separate from certain years of our lives, why a particular song can return us to a room we haven’t entered in years, why opening an old book can feel less like reading and more like meeting someone we used to be.
Perhaps fiction gives pain something real life rarely does: a boundary. Real heartbreak doesn’t tell you where the last page is. Grief doesn’t come with a runtime. But a story does. It can take you somewhere terrible and, eventually, bring you home. We allow it to hurt us because we know it will end.
I used to think the stories that stayed with us were the ones we loved most. I’m not sure anymore. Maybe they are the ones that found us at the right, or the wrong, time. The ones that said something we weren’t ready to say ourselves. The ones we misunderstood beautifully. The ones we understood too late. The ones we return to years later and realise were never really about the characters at all. They were about the person watching them.
I write for the same reason, I think. Not because every feeling needs to become a story, but because some of them refuse to leave until we have found the words for them.
The pages I wrote myself are no exception. I have gone back to Heartbeats & Stethoscope and Tales from Within, both barely a year old, and found a person in them I am not certain I still am. She was sure about things I have since stopped being sure about. I would not write either of them the same way now, and I have stopped treating that as a failure.
So that is what I intend to do here. Return to the books, the films, the songs, and occasionally my own sentences, and see what they have to say to whoever I am by the time I get back to them.
haunted by words 