The Page

Short story

I loved the page, the expressions of all of the hope and fear, joy and despair, the amalgams of a life filled with inexplicable experiences it contained. I Ioved the nostalgia and the airy fluency of the words. It did not matter what the words said, it only mattered that they attempted to convey the often irrational thoughts and emotions of a human being out of step with time and dedicating all of its mental and spiritual faculties to making some sense of the absurdity of human life.

I ate the words, because knowledge is a kind of food. The fire that burns in the acids of the stomach to facilitate digestion also burn in the mind, and the words need also to be digested. I saw shapes and colors, cities and towns. Time and place overlapped and cross contextualized. All things became one thing and then that one thing ceased to be. The page smelled like vanilla, a tiny molecule that is released when printing paper ages, yellows, becomes brittle and finally falls to pieces. Love, life, laughter, tears, loss, inspiration and the sysiphean task of moving through it all toward an unknowable end, somehow maintaining a frail dignity along the way. The page spoke beautifully of all of this.

The candles guttered, and the night was dark. Stars shone brilliantly against the blackness. As gently as I could manage I creased the page close to where it was bound and ripped it from the book. In my hands it felt alive, glowing and warm. I inhaled its incense and its age. Of all the souls who had marveled at its grace or had been confounded by its tone, I knew I would be the last to ponder its inscrutable mystery. As the candles died I walked through the door, leaving the place behind, I would have burned it to the ground if my conscious would have allowed. I turned onto the cobbled street and left town by the East road. I knew I would never set foot in that place again. I would not set foot in any place again.

Reviews

[roarke]

I enjoyed your description of the page. The last paragraph, an intimate action prompted by the feeling toward the page takes the previous two paragraphs and sets them free into the universe, metaphorically speaking. Words on a page, very powerful stuff.

[Nila M.]

Hey, thanks a lot, Roarke! I had this experience of wanting to just absorb something I had read and all it contained, so this was kind of what that became. Thanks for reading and the comment!

[magensby]

'I loved the page', 'I ate the words', 'and ripped it from the book' expresses movement and then carries the reader through the levels of that movement. Your words express that journey and we thank you for them.