So, I've just finished reading Simon Van Booy's Everything Beautiful Began After. And I would like to say right up top that I hate the cover art. Hate it. The only thing worse would be any picture or illustration that shows a solitary woman from behind doing something--walking through a field alone, trailing her feet in the water off a dock alone, cooking alone, shopping alone. It's as if there is some book jacket illustrating company that has done market research and has determined that a faceless woman doing anything alone on the front of a book sells big. It kills me. So, this book's cover art isn't that bad, but it does make it look like the book is a romance. . . and it's not and so, boo.

But otherwise, this is a gorgeous, sad, hopeful, thoughtful book. Three people in love in Greece. There's a tragedy (it's Greece, no?), leaving two broken people, thankfully still in love, though not the way you would imagine. "Thankfully", because sad people need tethers or they float away. Because sad people need someone to tie them here or they might never be able to find their way back.

But Everything Beautiful Began After is about hope and where joy or beauty comes from. It's about fate without actually believing in it. And reading it and finishing it made me cry--in a good way--and then it made me think about two things:

One.

When I was four, my parents took my brother and me to Europe for three weeks. It's the only time I have been overseas, and I usually only remember really random kid things from the trip in a lot of detail--scary fountains, specific popsicles, angry swans in Vienna, a weird street play in Munich, toys in a window in Bern. But something I have not thought about for years. . . As the trip was winding down and exhaustion was setting in, I remember really clearly riding on the Eurail and thinking I was tired and that my parents looked tired and that the trip had to end. And we were sharing a compartment with a young Japanese woman who made us origami birds. She may not have been Japanese. She could have been Russian or Portugese or African. In my memory she's Japanese because she gave us origami. But she knew a very small amount of German and my parents knew a very small amount of German and so their conversation couldn't last long. And then when conversation faded, she folded delicate little cranes for my brother and for me to fill the silence. And then a day or two later, me throwing mine off our back porch back in Cincinnati and being a little disappointed that it couldn't actually fly.

But I think of that, that smaller younger version of me with a small paper bird that had crossed an ocean, that had been made by a person that we knew in that train car. . . not knew, maybe, but had shared a portion of our lives with. Who is she now? Where was she during the tsunami in Japan? Is she happy? And thinking about the way strangers come in and out of our lives, are known briefly and then become strangers again. It's beautiful.

And then. . .

Two.

My husband and I are in love and married because a young man he knew said "palindrome" to a young woman I knew. . .on a train. Everything beautiful began after that. . . Such luck.

And that's beautiful, too.