Hello, my sweet friends, 

A few nights ago I watched an Instagram reel of someone reading their favorite quotes from White Nights by Dostoevsky, and some of the quotes have been living rent-free in my mind since then. So to continue my “lovelorn and nobody knows” energy, I decided to break my own heart and read it. Praise Hoopla for having it instantly available as an ebook. Then after I read it, I decided to read it again because as I mentioned, I apparently love breaking my own heart.

The Romanticization of Loneliness

Before I even get into the book itself, first let’s talk about the romanticization of loneliness. So many people say that you should go on self-dates and love yourself more, but there are two sides to that coin and I, at least, teeter in both directions of that line. 

• Sometimes I love going to farmer’s markets myself to buy flowers and go on long drives by myself, but then other times I’ll be solo at Trader Joe’s looking at all the choices for Oat Milk and get overwhelmed that I don’t have someone else there with me to help me decide what to buy. 
• Sometimes I love taking selfies with myself in gardens, museums, and at Harry Potter World, but then I’ll witness an incredibly innocent and wholesome moment between strangers and I will be overwhelmed with warmth and happiness for them with a deep twinge of sadness. 
• Sometimes I love being incredibly vulnerable and blogging about my life, my favorite books, my dreams, and everything about me for thousands of you all to read in an effort to be more genuine, real, relatable, and wholesome, but then other times I get scared and get a vulnerability hangover (though I’m working really hard to feel that hangover less and less).

I can’t even describe how this story is making me feel. It’s like someone took my brain from the last two months and turned it into a book. 

The Most Romantic Things I’ve Been Told

Second, this next part will tell you a lot about me, but two of the most romantic things that people have said to me are the following:

1. “I can’t wait to see you – I feel like I haven’t seen you in months but we only met a few weeks ago”
2. Being told while I was mid-crying: “Hey, come here, we’ll figure this out” 

In the last couple of months, I have made the point several times that the person you are when you’re hurting and heartbroken is not the same person you are when you’re happy and healing. You confuse kindness for affection and confuse care for love. On top of that, you can be consistently grieving or lonely, and then you’ll have a pocket of happiness and moments that you cling onto that get you through the day and make you feel “Hey, I can get through this.” 

This book has everything: 1) He is lonely and clinging onto glimpses of happiness; 2) She is clinging to her dream and what she wants to believe but then descends back into reality, then questions herself, and then goes back into the daydream; 3) They’re both living for the hope of it all; 4) It’s unrequited, it’s longing, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s raw.

Hope, Love, Sadness, Longing, and Loneliness Co-Exist 

Lastly, I decided to do something kind of weird with this post. Since both times I read White Nights I was blasting “Slut!” I started connecting lyrics from the song to passages in the story. The complicated version of me is that I’m 50% harlequin romance and 50% melancholy. This blog post is a mellow middle. 

I’m not going to give a summary of the book; I’m not going to warn you about spoilers (though can you really give spoilers on stories written 175 years ago?); I’m not even going to try to put into words the emotional impact this book has had on me in the last week. Instead, I’m just going to include my favorite passages from the book. Interpret it as you will. And with that, I bring you, White Nights:

On Loneliness 

Lovelorn and nobody knows; love thorns all over this rose…
The wrong place at the right time…

• “He desires nothing, because he is superior to all desire, because he has everything, because he is satiated, because he is the artist of his own life, and creates it for himself every hour to suit his latest whim.”
• “I was already regretting that I had gone so far, that I had unnecessarily described what had long been simmering in my heart, about which I could speak as though from a written account of it, because I had long ago passed judgment on myself and now could not resist reading it, making my confession, without expecting to be understood”
• “Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another”
• “So when we are unhappy we feel the unhappiness of others more; feeling is not destroyed but concentrated…”

On Glimpses of Happiness

You know it might be worth it for once…
Half asleep, taking your time, in the tangerine, neon light, this is luxury…

• “You describe it all splendidly, but couldn’t you perhaps describe it a little less splendidly? You talk as though you were reading it out of a book.”
• “Indeed, he is ready to believe at some moments that all this life is not suggested by feeling, is not mirage, not a delusion of the imagination, but that it is concrete, real, substantial!”
• “It was such a charming little brick house, it looked so hospitably at me, and so proudly at its ungainly neighbours, that my heart rejoiced whenever I happened to pass it.”
• “I’ve made up my mind to find out all about you minutely. But as I have no one from whom I can find out anything, you must tell me everything fully yourself … tell me your whole history”
• “Why, one thanks some people for being alive at the same time with one; I thank you for having met me, for my being able to remember you all my life!”

On Love

And I break down, then he’s pulling me in…
You’re not saying you’re in love with me, but you’re going to…

• “But forgive me that a doubt has stolen—if only for one instant—into my heart.”
• “I’m going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year”
• “If you ever fall in love with someone, God give you happiness with her! I won’t wish anything for her, for she will be happy with you.”
• “I would love you so, that even if you still loved him, even if you went on loving the man I don’t know, you would never feel that my love was a burden to you. You would only feel every minute that at your side was beating a grateful, grateful heart, a warm heart ready for your sake”

On Goodbye

What if, all I need is you?
Love to think you’ll never forget…

• “I stood a long time looking after them. At last the two vanished from my sight.”
• “If you forgive me, the memory of you will be exalted by a feeling of everlasting gratitude which will never be effaced from my soul. . . . I will treasure that memory: I will be true to it, I will not betray it, I will not betray my heart: it is too constant”
• May your sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and untroubled, and may you be blessed for that moment of blissful happiness which you gave to another, lonely and grateful heart!
• “I came to tell you all about it, feeling as though time were standing still, feeling as though one sensation, one feeling must remain with me from that time for ever; feeling as though one minute must go on for all eternity, and as though all life had come to a standstill for me”

There are too many passages to choose from and too many emotions to describe. But sometimes you’ll read a book or listen to a song or have a conversation that is so intense and powerful that it consumes you and you think about it for days. And I personally need more things like that – I need to do more things that make me forget to check my phone, I need to read more books that I can’t put down, and I need to listen to more songs that perfectly describe a feeling that I can’t pinpoint. I think that’s the reality of the world – humans and emotions are complicated. And sometimes it doesn’t make any sense… but I guess that makes the moments that things do make sense, all the better.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

If you missed me and want me to revive my blog post and/or podcast, or if you want to join me while I go through my 28th year around the sun, then please click the follow or subscribe button! Feel free to connect with me through this platform, twitter, my coffee and checkins Instagram, my podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Amazon Music, or email me at coffeeandcheckins@gmail.com! If you have any suggestions for topics or anything you’d like me to write/speak about, please let me know🙂❤