Jazz, Toni Morrison

I finished Jazz yesterday, most of it while sitting by the window at Xanana's, with a mug of coffee before me, flipping the pages so rapidly and intensely as if my life depended on it, being drawn into the world where we fall in love with the images we conjure, where we fall in love not for the other, but because we want and we need the warmth of somebody.

Violet and Joe. Out of love after the beautiful beginning, when she had looked into his eyes and lost herself in it. He, falling out of tree, and she beginning their relationship with already this waiting, and working and labouring. And they both invented new people and things to distract them, things to keep them going. The doll Violet clung to and the daughter she might have had, and for Joe, it was Dorcas, someone he loved because he wanted to prove that he was still worth loving, because the girl would not care that it was love he cared for more than anything else in the world.

Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he.

And at the end of the book, when Violet and Joe return to their first love, it smacks of emptiness. Of desperation. That they returned to love each other because they had learnt that that was the only way they would ever get any love. Their murmuring under the sheets or even the public love they now shared. And to hear them say 'I have loved only you'.

And knowing that the 'you' wasn't the person they were looking at.