Giddy with Joy
From the Diary of Nina Rosewood
A small diary entry, written this morning, after finishing the final revision of A Day Like a Thousand Years.
“Then came a round of beach volleyball. Rosanne ran about the sand, giddy with joy.”
Oh, my dear diary,
I’m so giddy with joy, just like my girl in the novel.
She is running around playing volley ball on the beach, after what she’s been through. And I am sitting in my deckchair on the sunny balcony.
No, let me be faithful. I was. At the moment I am baking pancakes and will be bringing them over to the balcony in a minute, to share and devour them.
I’m a quick diary writer, I keep an eye on the pan while doing my entry.
I am soo relieved! That is also just like her. She who carries my middle name: Rosanne.
The girl has no other name. It makes her more delicate than I am, although I recognize her mix of delicacy and strength in myself too.
I carry another name. It’s my first one. I like it. In fact that name supports me. Nina has just that touch of a warrior in it. It embodies my strength. And I need that strength badly.
One of the things I need my strength for is to write about love, trust and tenderness while taking in the world news and its terrors on a daily basis.
Let me thank you all, you courageous and faithful journalists. I feel so indebted to you and all your hard work. Your work is so needed.
But mine is too. Both require courage.
And being courageous has worked here. What a job this last polish—or adaptation—has been, on my most precious novel, A Day Like a Thousand Years. It needed strengthening, while preserving all its delicacy. Yes, it worked! Coming of age, she faced what she had to face. That is a birth in itself. Being the story-teller I had to step back and listen better to her. Now this child at the threshold of growing up has been delivered safely, at last. Now it is her story.
I feel it in my stomach, my belly, my bones.
She’s there, my sweet middle named one.
She influences me. Today I am writing almost as girly as my middle named one does, back there in her world of 1972. We’re not that different of course, but still a little different. Technically speaking I am not a young girl, but an old girl. And a wise woman too. But that young one also has her wisdom.
The relief is unspeakable. It is there, sensory, bodily, almost like falling in love, haha! And she doesn’t feel otherworldly at all, she doesn’t feel like a character, nor like a daughter, I recognize her and it is even more than that. And now the girl is safe. She is safely enveloped as that book character, she is there as she is, and is safe, but she has done that herself. Not me. She has reached the shore, and now she has a life before her.
Giddy with joy. That’s what she is…
Isn’t she lovely, made by love?
Thank you so much, Stevie Wonder!
She has arrived and she is loved. And she lets herself be loved.
Isn’t that always the same miracle?
That once you face your shadows and your fears, and your weaknesses, and learn about your cowardice, and the urge to run away, that then you become the hero, or the heroine. My very girly heroine: you have earned your title! Now you are the she-bear truly. You have won.
I am so grateful. And as always I feel the instruments, I feel the laboratory, all the tools I needed to create this. Wow, Nina. It’s there, in English, with the full soul and body, with the universal glory of a single girl’s story about blossoming into her first love, the first love that is not just surrounding her. She had to overcome fears and hesitations and urges to remain in a dream state to let it happen.
Warmest congrats, Rosanne!
Oh, it’s almost as if she replies: “And warmest congrats, Nina Rosewood! We did it!”