A Book On the Middle Shelf
I am a book on the middle shelf, spine facing out.
Some mornings I watch the new arrivals get placed on the table by the window.
Their covers catch the light in ways mine no longer does.
Pages still crisp, holding themselves open at perfect right angles.
No one has bent their corners or left coffee rings on page forty-seven.
No one has marked their lines with a harsh pen.
They have a specific smell, it lingers with deserved potential.
But me..
I smell like someone's living room.
Like the last few months spent next to a lavender candle.
Like the afternoon someone read me in the bath and dropped me,
then tried to dry my pages with a hairdryer.
I swelled and never quite returned to my original shape after that one.
There is a note in my margin on page sixty-three.
"This is exactly how it felt when she left," it says,
in a handwriting that slopes to the right like it's leaning into something.
I think about that person sometimes.
How they chose me, how they trusted me with that small truth.
On the shelf below me is a volume so worn the title has rubbed away.
The owner keeps it because someone comes in every few months
and asks for it by the color of its cover alone.
"The blue one about the garden."
"Oh, right."
Above me is a pristine first edition that everyone photographs but no one buys.
Too precious to actually live with.
Too beautiful to risk loving.
I have been picked up and put down more times than I can count.
Hands that flip to the first page and then keep going.
Hands that read the summary and move on.
Once, someone held me for twenty minutes,
before checking their phone and setting me back.
They read the first three chapters while standing in the aisle.
I felt the weight of their attention and then just as quickly...
its absence.
But there have been other hands too.
The ones that ran along my spine with recognition.
The person who sat on the floor and read me in one afternoon, missing their bus home.
The woman who bought me came back two weeks later
to tell the owner that I had helped her understand what she couldn't.
I know what I am now.
My pages are thin in places, threatening to tear.
My spine creaks when opened.
Someone has written their name inside the front cover and then crossed it out.
Another person has added theirs below.
I am evidence that people were here,
that they felt something.
The store fills with afternoon light and dust.
It falls on all of us equally.
The untouched and the beloved,
the forgotten and the returned.
We wait here together,
holding our different stories.
Sometimes I think about that person who wrote in my margins.
How they came to the end of me and decided I was worth keeping,
worth making their own.
How we belonged to each other for a while.
And then how they let me go so I could find someone else.
So that way I could be found all over again.
I am here on the middle shelf.
Pages soft from turning, spine gentle from being opened.
I have been written in.
I have been loved in the careless way of daily things.
My corners are bent from being carried in coat pockets and read on park benches.
I am ready.
For the next pair of hands that will know me not despite the wear,
but because of it.
For someone who understands that the most beautiful books
are the ones that have already been lived with.
That a cracked spine means a story worth returning to.
That the best things aren't always new.
I wait here in the used book store,
among all the other volumes that have been opened and closed,
chosen and released.
We are hidden in this nook.
We are not waiting to be perfect.
We are waiting to be seen.
-Nevie Jay