I have been lucky enough to have a life long love affair with books. I love the way they smell, feel, the sound they make when you crack a new one open, as the spine gives way to your exploration. I mean, fuck, it is sensual. I love they way they feel in my hands, the way the text appears on the page. I love having stacks of them in every room in my house.
I realized that books are a part of every love language I could have...
Take me to a bookstore
Give me a book
Read me a book next to me
Touch me next to books
Talk to me about a book
I can think of nothing more romantic than to go to a used bookstore, tucked away in some little hamlet, and to grab a cup of coffee, and spend hours making eye contact over the top of a book, interspersed with aroused flirtatious knowing wanton glances. And then, I guess if I am writing the movie version of my life, we would sneak away to some long forgotten store of authors dead and gone, and fuck like a love scene from 50 shades of grey...only to return to our well worn armchairs in the spot by a fire, spent, breathless and satisfied. I know not your usual sexual fantasy but it is mine.
When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to the bookstore at the mall. We would have dinner somewhere and then spend the rest of the evening wandering around the bookstore in search of ideas we couldn't quite articulate...in search of something we did not currently possess. This was a Friday night in my childhood that assures me that love was palpable, and all possessing. They loved me enough to share this world of books with me...and in so doing, gave me the love of reading and writing.
There is such an intimacy to being granted access to another person’s thoughts, dreams, ideas, and all other freshly revealed significances of another. In writing, you can reveal yourself boldly on the page, or with a winding truth that evolves and builds one word at a time over chapters and verses. I love the crescendo of that...the building towards climax. I mean, how could it possibly not be sexual?
In every dusty volume there is a world, a galaxy of words and ideas and longings and trauma and pain and loss and everything. Each book represents someone’s inner workings, someone’s inner thoughts and authentic self. I mean each person as we amble around this world, is very book like. I mean we see the dust jacket, the cover which only intimates barely what lies beneath.
When I was waiting for my lunch date yesterday, and truth, I was reading, I saw a homeless couple amble by on their makeshift mobility apparatuses which was somewhere between a cart and a bike. Some vehicle of movement fashioned from the things the rest of us left behind, discarded as unworthy and purposeless. And I saw each of these persons as unexplored studies in humanity. A book of their own, to be written by no one likely. But inside the complex exterior there existed a litany of words, dreams, lies and lives. And I saw them each as pieces of literature just not well developed yet. Plots that were ongoing but wild, untamed.
I am pretty sure I can relate everything in this life to a book...
My mom is retired and she reads all the time. Every single day. She reads hundreds of books a year. She has a journal she keeps about the books she reads and while I am sure she would share it with me now, I kind of can’t wait until she dies to be granted this journal of her most private thoughts about the things she has read. And while I know all I need to do is ask, I feel that my reading of that intimacy should wait until the only conversation I can have with her about it is one that shall go on incessantly for the remainder of my life.
Books rise like vapor from a steaming cup of coffee. They beckon and welcome you to their intimate struggle. They tease you and tempt you in ways that make you alter, change and burn. And I fucking love them. Currently, as I type this, there are four books on my nightstand all in various stages of being read. One just cracked. Another waiting in wantonness. Another read and being now picked apart for writing fodder like carion by some scavenger bird. And the other, a hopeful bystander waiting for its turn to alight my fingers for further exploration...
I think I just got a little turned on right there...I know, I know I am a fucking weirdo. Word porn. Book porn. It really is my thing.
So much of life occurs for me in writing. I seem to need the distance between writer and reader to manage all the complex feelings I possess of love, loss, strength and resilience, faith and hope, fear and dread. If you ever want me to fall in love with you, even for a day, write me a letter or a poem or a sonnet. And I swear to God, I will be yours if only for a moment.
I am sure my ideal mate, which I have truly given up trying to find, exists out there flowers in hand, poem scratches on a receipt from his pocket, stack of books beneath his arm precariously holding a steaming cup of coffee in one hand while the other reaches up to knock on my door. If a man like this ever comes for me, and you never see us again, you will find us, in bed, reading, fucking, and laughing while drinking coffee naked. Enter if you dare...on second thought, please never look for us so that we may live forever in this bare intimacy shared between two people whose love of books and each other has surpassed the loving standard of dying while attempting to eek out a life under the not so quiet hum of a droning device.
Books are the end of result of writing. And that is something I practice every day. I do not like everything I write, but I like the fact that I write it very much. I like the words appearing one after the other, over and over in some sort of exponentially evolving existence that is mine alone.
And I love the privacy and integral knowledge books provide me in this ever evolving existence I have come to love. Books grant me passage to parts of myself and others that I could not engage any other way. Books feed my soul. They awash me in feelings that of my own accord I would avoid. I need the pace and tenor of words on a page to somehow sync me to the rhythm of my life...without the word filled books, I would just not exist. It is the ones that I read and the ones that I write that grant me passage to healing, to grace and to a love that is ever evolving and alchemical to the person I was just previously. I am forever altered and rearranged by the words I read, the words I write and the words I allow to remain unsaid.
Books turn me on and off and change me in ways that is hard to describe because it is in the descriptive process that I am becoming, one moment after another this me that I am, I was and I will be. For me, always, books remain the tender for love, for life and living. And ready exchange of life for life, one word at a time forever.
Again...still.
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