Palimpsest
I told you not to annotate the book I gave you, but you did anyway. When I point it out, you look at me like I have just said something unforgivable—wounded, almost. You tell me that scribbling in the margins helps you understand things better, that books are meant to be lived in. But my Maggie Nelson book was untouched before you.
I had read it twice, carefully, without bending the spine, without marking a single page. I like my things in pristine condition—you never do. You leave pieces of yourself everywhere, in the smallest places, in the spaces no one else thinks to look.
Even now, your words are still on my door, scrawled in ink. They linger like a whisper behind the wood. Most of them are meaningless—half-formed thoughts, some misspelled, scrawled without care. The sight of your recklessness makes my eye twitch. You once told me you only write down things that truly matter to you. But the only words I can make out are names: Ottessa Moshfegh, Elif Batuman, Anne Sexton.
And when I read, I find you lingering between the lines, slipping into characters where you don’t quite belong. I especially see you in the peripheral characters or the supernumerary actors on TV. They’re the ones who hover at the edges of the story—never essential, yet impossible to ignore. You are not the protagonist, not the driving force, but still, you remain. You’re like a name scrawled in the back of a borrowed book, forgotten but never erased.
When I lend you books, they always return to me scarred—pages dog-eared, margins scribbled with your restless thoughts. Careless, cruel. You underline words that you think are interesting: incongruence, melancholia, astute, bereft. I copy them onto lined paper, letting them linger under my gaze, their meanings stretching and shifting in the quiet. I intertwine them with my memories of you, weaving a sweater for my brain.
The thing about books—about words—is that they last. Even after books are returned, after the ink fades away and the pages yellow, the glue comes undone from the spine, they hold onto what was left in them. I can’t bring myself to smooth out the creased corners– or scrub your words from my door. You’ve always been restless, always running—and maybe, just this once, I want you to keep going.
