Hari ini, “tulisan” yang dihadirkan buat Anda sederhana saja. Kata “tulisan” tentu saja harus saya tempatkan dalam tanda kutip, karena yang disajikan di sini bukan buatan saya, tetapi karya orang lain.

By sheer of fate, saya menemukan mereka di tahun ini. Tidak semua dari mereka lahir atau terbit tahun ini. Namun semuanya baru saja saya temukan selama 12 bulan terakhir.

Mereka ini adalah sekedar kutipan dari buku-buku yang saya baca sepanjang tahun 2016 yang berat ini. Tidak banyak buku yang sempat saya baca dan selesaikan. Sampai sekarang saya merasa masih harus benar-benar meninggalkan zona nyaman untuk sekedar membaca buku dan menyelesaikannya. Tanpa gangguan ponsel, film, serial televisi, dan pekerjaan.

Maka di sela-sela jadwal bepergian, yang tidak terlalu banyak tahun ini, dan di antara aroma kopi panas yang baru mengepul di pagi hari saat sarapan, inilah kutipan-kutipan yang mengena di benak sampai sekarang. Mungkin mereka bukan buku yang terbaik. Apalagi sempurna. Tapi bukankah selalu ada a beauty in every flaw? Paling tidak sesuatu yang indah itu ada dalam bentuk kalimat yang layak kutip.

Dan saya ingin membaginya, khusus buat Anda:

(“A Little Life” – Hanya Yanagihara)

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”

(“The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry – Gabrielle Zevin)

“You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?”

“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”

(“A Strangeness In My Mind” – Orhan Pamuk)

“In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.”

(“Tidak Ada New York Hari Ini” – Aan Mansyur)

“Ada saat kau menemukan cinta
adalah umbi-umbian di lemari pendingin.
Mereka tiba-tiba bertunas meskipun sudah
lama lupa rupa dan aroma tanah.”

(“Falling” – Julia Cohen)

“This is what love feels like.
It’s a burning in your chest. A free fall through whooshing air. It’s an itch in your skin which can only be soothed by touching. It’s how you store up every little word and expression and hoard for it later, when you can go through it in your head and look for coded messages. It makes you greedy and jealous and resentful and sad. It makes you hate the person you were born as – a jigsaw with a piece out of place where your heart should be.

…

Can you even love that way, in the real world? When you’re itching and burning and hurting? When all you want to do is scream and kick things and rail against the fact that Avril was born without that thing that I have that makes me love her?
This is what love feels like. It feels hopeless and helpless, like holding on to a slippery rock in a churning sea. And I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
I wouldn’t.”

Semoga apa yang kita pilih untuk kita baca bisa membuat hidup kita lebih baik, meskipun hanya sejenak.