The Space Between Words

Dear Elena,

I finished chapter twelve today. You were right about Mr. Darcy — he's insufferable, but I think that's the point. Do you suppose Austen had any idea how many people would fall in love with him anyway? And there’s something in the way he pauses when Elizabeth is turned away…

With her finger Maya I followed the text, felt the tiny grooves of indentations left by the pen. She leafed through the book and found more notes sprinkled throughout — observations about characters, questions about plot points, stray fragments of thoughts that felt intimate and immediate.

I had the dream about the lake scene again. Not the one from the movie the one in my head were Elizabeth doesn’t turn aside and does walk straight into the water.

Do you believe people can love each other across centuries? I mean, if you meet someone in the wrong fucking decade, then what happens? Does that love just … pause?

Chapter twenty-three made me cry. I don't know why. Something about how Elizabeth finally sees that she’s been wrong about everything. Have you ever felt like that? As if you’ve been living in a story you had badly misconceived?

Maya purchased the book and brought it back to her studio apartment. She brewed some tea and curled up on her couch, reading both Austen’s words and the cryptic marginalia. The handwriting seemed familiar somehow, but she couldn’t think to where. The observations could be thoughtful or whimsical, but they were always looking for another level deeper down.

That night, she dreamed of a woman with dark hair who sat by a window and wrote in the pages of a book. In the dream, the woman raised her face and smiled, but Maya awoke before she could see her face properly.

Maya returned to the bookstore the next day and inquired about the book to the ailing proprietor.

“Oh, that one,” Mrs. Chen said, straightening her glasses. “It came in with a box of books from an estate sale. Young woman, maybe your age. So sad."

"What happened to her?"

Mrs. Chen's expression grew distant. "Car accident, I think. All her books were brought in by her mother. Told me she couldn’t bring herself to keep them, but couldn’t bring herself to throw them out, either.”

Maya's chest tightened. She thought about the precise notes, the unanswered questions, the conversation truncated.

That night, she pulled out a blue pen and sat at the kitchen table, opening the book to a blank margin.

Dear Elena,

I found your letters today. I see that you were not writing to me, but please don’t mind if I write back. I completed the book—all of it, including your musings. You were totally right about everything — most especially about love that waits across time.

Maya hesitated, taken aback by her own words. She was never one to buy into the idea of fate or the cosmic eye, but there was something about Elena’s voice in the margins that made it feel like returning home to a conversation she had been trying to have all her life.

I think Lizzy and Darcy work because they both need to be different people to see each other. Not completely different—just... more like themselves, if you know what I mean. You wrote a love letter spanning thousands of years and I wonder if that is what they wrote. They adored the people they would grow to be.

Over the next few weeks, Maya kept coming back to the book every night. She would read out Elena’s notes and answer them, occasionally concurring, occasionally kindly disagreeing, always maintaining the sense of chatting with a friend she’d known for years.

You wondered whether people can love across time. I suspect that love is maybe the one thing that truly transcends time.” What, like, the love doesn’t respect the time and place, it doesn’t care what it’s doing, who it strikes. It just... is.

I still think a lot about your dream about Elizabeth walking into the lake. What do you suppose would have happened if she had? Would she have discovered anything there, or at least gotten wet?

Chapter thirty-four is devastating. When Darcy shows Elizabeth the letter that explains everything—do you think he knew she’d believe him? Or perhaps he was simply desperate to speak the truth, regardless of what it did — or didn’t do.

Maya's friends started to worry. She declined invitations, saying she was busy with a “project.” She wasn't lying, exactly. The book was now a project, a shared venture with a being who lived only in carefully wrought letters and half-formed thoughts.

I would love to know what you looked like while reading this. You settled into a chair the way I do? Did you make tea? Did you ever read its sad parts aloud, to make them less lonesome?

Sometimes it feels like I’m writing to a ghost and sometimes it feels like I’m writing to the most real person I’ve ever known. Is that strange? You are more fleshed out to me than the average person I actually talk to.

One night, Maya had the dream of Elena again. This time, she was able to see her face — sharp cheekbones, dark eyes and a smiling mouth that gave nothing away. In the dream, she and Elena were someplace with a small table and were talking about what the book was about, with Elena as though lecturing to an old friend.

"I always wondered if someone would find my notes,” Elena said in the dream. “I was hoping they would get what I was trying to work out.”

"What were you trying to figure out”? Maya asked.

“If you can love someone you have never met. Whether stories can bring us into contact with people we were always supposed to know.”

Tearful, Maya woke up from the dream.

The following night she penned what she somehow knew would be her final scrawl to Elena.

Dear Elena,

I think I see now the puzzle you were trying to solve. You wanted to know if love is knowing a person or recognizing one. Whether we fall in love with beings or with the idea of what they could be.

I never knew you, but I know you. I know you cried in chapter twenty-three and had dreams about the lakes. I remember that you believed in love beyond time and stories that shape us. I know you saw magic in the line between words.

Perhaps that is what love is — not the object itself, but what surrounds it. The possibility. The almost.

I don’t know, I think I’ll hang onto this book, if that’s okay. I’m going to continue our conversation in my mind, although I know you can’t write to me. I guess because I think you had it right about time — that there are things that wait for us on the other side of it, and there are things that are worth waiting for.

Thank you for teaching me that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness. That some of the most important conversations in life occur between the lines. That absence can be a form of presence, and presence can be a form of love.

I hope wherever you are you’re still asking questions that need asking. May you still find magic in the space between the words.

With love across time, Maya

Maya put the book over her heart and shut it. Outside her window, the city buzzed with life people rushing home to families, lovers eating dinner, friends laughing over coffee. But within her apartment, in the space between words, she felt less like a lonely woman than she had in years.

She never penned another note to Elena again, but kept the book beside her on her nightstand. Late at night, she sometimes picked it up and fan through its pages, read their conversation over from the beginning, marvelling at how Elena’s voice had filled out not only the margins of a book, but the margins of her life.

And every once in a while, just every once in a while, she could have sworn that she heard Elena’s voice in between her thoughts, still asking questions that counted, still discovering magic within the places where words stopped and wonder began.