Like an Open Book

Beginning? Middle? End? of a story.

When I was young, I loved to go to the library. There were shelves upon shelves of hundreds, no, thousands, of books: too many for me to ever read. To me, they were perfect: they were the clichéd escape from the world and much more: they were something new, something unexplored, something to learn. I was all about learning then. My mother got so sick of it she even used to get onto me for going off and reading all the time. “Sophia – put the book down and socialize for once,” she used to tell me. At one point she made a rule that I had to ask permission to read, as though it was some dangerous act that required her regulation. I rarely followed this rule and continued to lock myself up with my book: my unknown adventure that differed from day to day, from book to book.

 

When I was around twelve or thirteen, I would only read books that were obviously new. No used or borrowed book would do; I needed a book gleaming from non-use, a book that I would be the first and the only person to love. That was also the time that I believed in the ideal of a soulmate – the idea that there was one person in this entire world that I was destined to love, that I would share and give my love only to that person, just as he would share and give his love only to me, that we would be each other’s brand-new, never-before read or opened or even touched book, just brought from the boxes delivered from the printing house.

 

When I was seventeen, I met the boy that I believed could be this book. I took him off his shelf and he took me off mine and we opened each other to read all the pages from front to back and back to front and everywhere and every way in between. Then it fell apart, as these things sometimes do. I was angry and emotional and depressed, mostly because I had lost what I thought would be my soulmate, my favorite book, but also, in part, because I was now just a used book. I couldn’t never be read and enjoyed for the first time – someone had already discovered the twists and turns in the plot, the surprise ending, the ecstatic, almost rushed style in which I was written. I was stuck on a public library shelf for anyone to check out – they would enjoy me for a while, then return me for someone else’s amusement.

 

No longer was I gleaming – I had the slightly dingy look of the book that has been carried around in some bag for a long time and no longer has that ‘I’m new” sheen. The pages were falling apart – though still connected to the spine, they were no longer a part of it, but rather separate, barely clinging, barely holding on. Some of them were creased and folded, some had the faint stain of coffee or tea or another anonymous beverage lingering upon it. I’m sure that the cover was pathetic too – a torn edge and a definitive crease along the spine, running straight through the title and, so I thought, ruining it forever.

 

When I was eighteen and independent (as independent as a college student still depending on her parents for money can be, anyway), I began buying used and beat-up books to save some cash. I fell in love with them, every part of them: the knowledge that someone else had owned this book as well, the idea that I was somehow connected through the frayed pages with a person that I had never met and likely would never know, the happiness it gave me to find some surprise left behind, some bookmark holding a moment in time. I loved and loved for these glimpses into the past of someone else, and so I loved and lived for these used books, and I began to see that they were not beaten up to the point of breaking – they merely had an unknown past, just like their previous owner – just like every person in this world, including me. That did not make them – make me – ugly or unwanted or unworthy, it made me interesting and lovely and human. It did not mean that no one would ever read and appreciate me again, it just meant that I would have to wait for someone who was willing to take a chance on a used book.

 

Reviews

[Jacob Stinnett {Broken ..]

It's interesting.

[Avery James]

I love this. I can't really put into words how I can relate to it, but I think that we're on the same page. When a person is no longer new, and no longer gleaming, that doesn't mean that there story isn't worth reading anymore. They aren't sullied or ruined. Merely experienced. It adds to your story. The frayed edges and coffee stains on dog-eared pages only add to your story, Sophia. There is more to love with you now. I can love your story as well as the people and places you've seen. It does not subtract from your beauty, only adds graceful mystery.