I had been sitting at my desk for half an hour, my vision blurring, staring at a convoluted algebra problem. I was eighteen and taking a foundation course for a science degree. Since this term had started, my life had been a living hell. I felt like I was drowning, and I was barely getting four hours of sleep a night. The grueling coursework left me exhausted and demoralized. Of the original forty students in my class, fifteen had already dropped out. I was desperately trying to cling on, but it was no use. I loathed math and physics, but given the course I had chosen, I found myself spending most of my days studying them. I was drawn to literature and the arts, but as far as my parents were concerned, there were only two worthwhile careers, medicine and engineering.

But if my classes were excruciating, they were far from being the only source of my suffering. What was really killing me, what had reduced my heart to ashes, was my unrequited love for a girl.

2.

Morning and night, I thought about Vinca Rockwell. We’d known each other for three years, ever since her grandfather Alastair had sent her to school in France to get her away from Boston after her parents’ death. Vinca was not your average teenage girl; she was sophisticated, vibrant, witty. She had a shock of red hair, eyes that were of two different colors, delicate features. She was not the most beautiful girl at Saint-Ex, but she had a magnetic charm, a mysterious allure that drew you in and drove you insane. An indefinable quality that made you think that if you could just have Vinca, you would have the whole world.

For a long time, we were partners in crime, completely inseparable. I introduced her to the places I most loved—the botanic gardens in Menton, the Villa Kerylos, the Maeght Foundation, the winding lanes of Tourrettes-sur-Loup. We roamed the area, talking for hours on end. We hiked the Via Ferrata at La Colmiane, munched socca flatbread in the Antibes market, set the world to rights while sitting at the foot of the Genoese tower at Cap d’Antibes.

We could almost read each other’s minds. I was constantly amazed by the connection between us. Vinca was the person I’d been desperately longing to meet ever since I was old enough to desperately long for anything.

As far back as I could remember, I had always felt alone, somehow disconnected from the world, from its bustle, from a mediocrity as infectious as a disease. At one time, I convinced myself that books might cure me of this feeling of ennui, but it is foolish to ask too much of books. Books tell us stories, they allow us to vicariously live out snippets of other lives, but they cannot take you in their arms and comfort you when you’re scared.