LJ Idol // Literary Prize Fight - Week 3 : Tsundoku
Moving really tests your dedication to your things. As you slide a mattress atop a wheeled dolly, and shakily wobble it across a parking lot, and remember you needed to get the dresser in first, sometimes you just sigh, lean the mattress against the truck, and go get the dresser, half hoping someone just steals the goddamn thing so you never have to move it again. Bags and boxes and more bags of stuff gets tossed and donated.
But not the books.
“You’ve never even read that one,” he says accusingly.
“Exactly! I’m PLANNING to, though,” you say. Psssh. OBVIOUSLY, you don’t say.
“What about those?”
“Same!” you say, irked and appalled he could even insinuate your abandonment of these stories, these ideas.
“I don’t know if we have the room in the new place...” he trails off.
You contemplate ditching the arm chair. And the coffee table? That’d make space for new bookshelves, right? Maybe taller bookshelves is the answer...
Once settled, the still as yet unread books line the shelves, the familiar titles on their spines whispering homecoming welcomes as you slide them into place next to one another. Those that don’t quite fit go on top of the shelf in a stack.
The next week, your friend tells you about a book they just finished and how awesome it is. You put it on hold at the library. When you walk in to pick it up, another catches your eye. “Well, while I’m already here,” you say, and tuck it gently into your elbow, cradling it, like a small stray kitten that needs to come home with you for just a little while. It’s like it knows you’ll treat it with the utmost care and love, and of course you will. You take home a whole litter, in fact.
Will you read them? Not before the first time you press “renew all” on the library app. Maybe not before the second time, either, and possibly not before accruing thirty to eighty cents in late fees per volume. Maybe you won’t read some of them at all.
But they kept you company, these collections of thoughts, these amalgamations of dreams and ideas that someone else put forth. Someone out there in the world conceived a vision, sat in a chair and whittled away an entire story, an entire universe. The trees shed their skin in unity, and joined with the ideas to grow and birth whole new people, who exist simultaneously as wobbly black inky lines on a page, as well as corporeally breathing, living, speaking beings in the landscape of imagination. Just being near them feels like greatness.
Back into the library shelves and others’ hands they eventually go, for they have places to be, people to see. And love and care to spread. You’ll see them again, you’re sure, when the time is right, and whether or not you read one page, ten, four-hundred, or none at all, you know you’ll be happy to see them in stacks at your bedside, your couchside, and lining your shelves.
For what is a home with stacks upon stacks of books, but pure magic...
This has been an entry for LJ Idol, prompt: Tsundoku
But not the books.
“You’ve never even read that one,” he says accusingly.
“Exactly! I’m PLANNING to, though,” you say. Psssh. OBVIOUSLY, you don’t say.
“What about those?”
“Same!” you say, irked and appalled he could even insinuate your abandonment of these stories, these ideas.
“I don’t know if we have the room in the new place...” he trails off.
You contemplate ditching the arm chair. And the coffee table? That’d make space for new bookshelves, right? Maybe taller bookshelves is the answer...
Once settled, the still as yet unread books line the shelves, the familiar titles on their spines whispering homecoming welcomes as you slide them into place next to one another. Those that don’t quite fit go on top of the shelf in a stack.
The next week, your friend tells you about a book they just finished and how awesome it is. You put it on hold at the library. When you walk in to pick it up, another catches your eye. “Well, while I’m already here,” you say, and tuck it gently into your elbow, cradling it, like a small stray kitten that needs to come home with you for just a little while. It’s like it knows you’ll treat it with the utmost care and love, and of course you will. You take home a whole litter, in fact.
Will you read them? Not before the first time you press “renew all” on the library app. Maybe not before the second time, either, and possibly not before accruing thirty to eighty cents in late fees per volume. Maybe you won’t read some of them at all.
But they kept you company, these collections of thoughts, these amalgamations of dreams and ideas that someone else put forth. Someone out there in the world conceived a vision, sat in a chair and whittled away an entire story, an entire universe. The trees shed their skin in unity, and joined with the ideas to grow and birth whole new people, who exist simultaneously as wobbly black inky lines on a page, as well as corporeally breathing, living, speaking beings in the landscape of imagination. Just being near them feels like greatness.
Back into the library shelves and others’ hands they eventually go, for they have places to be, people to see. And love and care to spread. You’ll see them again, you’re sure, when the time is right, and whether or not you read one page, ten, four-hundred, or none at all, you know you’ll be happy to see them in stacks at your bedside, your couchside, and lining your shelves.
For what is a home with stacks upon stacks of books, but pure magic...
This has been an entry for LJ Idol, prompt: Tsundoku