Reading

To My Books, Now Arranged by Color by My Girlfriend

Meditations on the art of compromise

Dear books, you’re my job as a writer and teacher — and you’re my hobby, too. You hold memories of the people who gave you as gifts, the moments I spent in book stores and thrift stores to find you, and the hours I spent reading and rereading you.

You’ve always kept me going when I haven’t felt well. You taught me I wasn’t alone in being depressed. You showed me what it means to be gay.

As I recovered from surgery, you kept me company in the middle of the night when I’d wake up and eat some crackers in bed so that I could take a pain pill, which sometimes made your characters come vividly to life in my dreams.

I save you on my shelves so that I can look forward to you, and then I treat myself when I’m feeling low. After my surgery, I read Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym and A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, novels I knew would be quiet, wise, and comforting. You didn’t disappoint.

I call it chain-reading when I read you one after another, novels in particular. I mostly write poetry, and I read poems, too, but novels give me another world and worldview to swap for my own, especially when my own is filled with feeling feverish or achy or overwhelmed with the desire for sleep. And sometimes I just need a vacation from reality: I thank you for many of those.

You’ve been here for and with me since childhood, so of course I feel good to fill my house with you and to let you fill my thoughts. I gave away many of you from my childhood, but I still have several of you around from all that time ago.

Sometimes I’ve ignored important parts of my life to read you. Once I pick you up, I don’t notice my messy house — I don’t even see it anymore. I’ve needed to finish patching, priming, and painting my dining room for years now, and I can’t blame you for that, but I wonder if somewhere along the road, I mistook you for my life.

I mean, you’re part of my life, too. But part of it, right? I’ve spent so much time with you and with working on my own writing to add my own work to the shelf with you that sometimes I’ve let other things go.

Now I’m not going to let you or my writing go, but maybe we can find more balance. Maybe we can figure out how you fit into my life, instead of building my life on you. Maybe it’s like how I love to live in a place where I can look at the water, but I don’t want to live in a houseboat.

I want to live peacefully on solid ground in a house with my girlfriend and with you in the suburb where I grew up. It’s OK that yesterday she rearranged my shelf of novels and short stories in the living room according to the color of the spines. It does look cool. I can still find you when I need you.

She promised to leave you untouched in alphabetical order on my poetry shelf in the office/spare bedroom. I could move more of you into that little room, but I like to see you throughout the house. I’ll have to figure out which groups of you need my careful organization, like the textbooks for the classes I teach and others of you I refer to most often.

You and I can work on finding compromise. We can remember that my girlfriend is renting a storage unit while we figure out where to put you, and the other objects in my life which are full of meaning for me.

I know that I can look up from your pages and be open to reorganizing to find the space in this house to create more meaning with her, too.