Anaïs on Annamari

Annamari is my one friend that gets upset about my love dream, she calls my Nim a figment of my imagination, for she does not think much about him. But I think I guessed him right and I think that there is a man to be loved.
We often disagree Annamari and I. She calls herself pragmatic: she will not allow herself a foolish love. One should know where her interests are since no woman had benefited from such a foolish love before. It will break your heart and kill your laughter. This is how she speaks about love and life.
But you should not think that she is without ideals. She believes that women should have equal rights and incomes; that most children born with a disability can succeed and they have the right to live a normal life; that there should not be social classes and hungry people. She tends to think that anybody can become a millionaire.
We all love her keenness. She is full of energy, of all the sun that blessed her childhoods. She reaped the love of her family, the cheerfulness of her friends, the admiration of her teachers.
And I loved her the day of the day of the trip to this Romanian Orthodox Monastery sixty miles north of the city. The four of us in the car: Mona, Yuri driving, Annamari and I, chattering about Sci-Fi books. She was paying close attention, her look intense, charming as a four year old captured by the mastery of finger painting. While she hadn’t read as much fiction as we did, she always showed a genuine interest for knowledge, points of view to be remembered, details to be noted and events that are worth mentioning. She wanted to borrow some Ray Bradbury books, since a friend of hers, a boy at her university, liked him and spoke greatly abut Bradbury. But as we chattered and chattered, Mona mentioned the Handmaid’s Tale. The dystopian novels. Yuri and Mona became more serious in their discussion, the skewed ideology that governs these ‘perfect’ worlds was not a genre but part of their past.
Always eager to impress Mona, Annamari recalled how she read once, as a child, a dystopian novel about books and their importance, a novel named after the papers’ burning temperature.
“Oh, but that is Bradbury’s 451 Fahrenheit. So you read it after all”
“I guess I did”, she said and blushed. She said nothing until we got home. Her self-conscious gaucheness in front of Mona, was one of the few things that shadowed her gaiety.
So was Annamari and all the treasures she held inside under the chaotic memories of childhood games and laughter.