Dear Book,
Even though you and I do not share any dregs of DNA, I often think of you as my third parent -the way you are nurturing yet strict, provocative yet calming. You speak to me inaudibly in creative metaphors, action words and clusters of compacted idioms but I hear your voice loudly and clearly ringing through the folds of my brain as it seeps into my mind, and settles into my thoughts like a sprinkling of sawdust pulled into cohesion by the brawny arms of gravity. Your voice serves a multi-dimensional purpose: instigative at times, often invocatory, while wrapping me up in threads of emotions uncoiling, as if, from a spindle. You can bring joy and sadness within matter of minutes, alternating like a pendulum bob, through a simple act of comprehension; the edges of your alphabets dripping with beads of melancholia or whiffs and rinds of celebration. Contained within you is the spectrum of emotionality that remains couched behind the darkness of India ink, behind stretches of sentences with colons and apostrophes, and the devised anatomy of paragraphs. Reading through your skin, the bouquet of sentences, reveals the contents of your guts, your past history, the traces of your genealogy, and the messages you harness. You teach without sounds, you speak without lips and stay reliable through the storms of adolescence and adulthood, that brew and strengthen and accumulate with time, experience and inconsolable tragedy.
Holding you, or even just seeing you standing on the wood shelf, brings back memories from a long time ago. Betty D. adopted you from the local thrift store for seventy-five cents and brought you back to my parents house in a charcoal-colored plastic bag. I clothed you that afternoon in a brown paper skirt, combed around the sleeves and polished the semicircular ribbing spread across your spine, listening to the songs of rain pattering on the grass outside. For the next several days, I sat out on the patio and read your words, swelling up with emotions along the way. When Mother and Father went out for work for large stretches of time, delivering babies and suturing amputees, I would place my head on your firm paper body and tilt my ears to the side, hoping to hear sounds of vowels shuffling across your weighty stack. It would bring me joy, and comfort and solace in a way no other thing or person could. I never felt lonely with just your company, because you educated me, made me think, and challenged my beliefs. I clutched on to you the night Grandmother died, wriggling and squirming in her bed as emphysema gnawed away the bulbs of her alveoli. It brought comfort to me and a sense of closure. I took you in my book bag my first day of college, knowing I could talk to you if no one else did. And I surrounded myself with stencils of your words when people dismissed my sexuality. I have felt coupled to you all along because of your quality to fascinate me alongside your patience, your gentleness and kind demeanor. I romanticized, as a child, a future with you. And sometimes I feel that little has changed, even after seventeen long years.
A lot of people completely underestimate your personality. They look at you pityingly or objectify you completely or treat you as just a book. They ignore your body smells, your own pattern of aging and the fact that you bruise easily. They miss the the sound of flutter rushing across your leaves, fail to observe the bends and turns along the blunted rims of your abdomen, and gloss over the personal memories you evoke just by being you. They make bags out of your scales, decorative pieces for their homes, or sometimes even fashionable garments -immune to the sounds of your cries or your unconventional lisp, as they break open your rib cage or yank out your extremities. Since today is the age of convenience, portability and efficiency, a fair share of consumers have decided to digitalize you. They will preserve your words behind the rhomboid of an illuminated screen and access your outer casing through buttons and switches. All your friends and peers will be given shelter in the memory chip of the same device, categorized under file names. And you will vanish from the tangible to an abstract intangible, accessible only through puddles of liquid crystals fractionating and colliding on the interface of skin and glass. The feel of your follicles, the unevenness of your skin, the aroma of the non-multiplicative dead cells polygon-ed across each page -somehow they will not matter. The possibility of doodling and hand writing notes beside arcs of black typescript will not be relevant. Being able to flip through the sheaf of your constituents or laughing to your narratives with balls of spittle flying in heightened trajectory and landing on your laminated coverlet are deemed optional and unimportant. So, you are re-formatted by the know-it-all tycoons and publishers and book company magnates and electrocuted; militarized in a way, and made to be uniform.
I am thinking of the time you were used as a weapon, flung to my head out of a fit of rage. The time you were hidden from my mahogany shelf, serving as a repercussion for my rebellion and disobedience. But there was also that time when I leaned on your shoulder after receiving twenty rejection letters from professional school applications. I relish at your mysteries in the front car of the subway, as the rest of the commuters titter away to paradoxes of comedy clubs. You are my prized possession as I walk around the park, while the residents of the city glamorize for television, doll-up like marionettes wired to culture, and sparkle like rhinestones in cages of mirrors. Most importantly, you are like a parent -a role-model of tolerance, a constant companion and a person of reliance, as Mother and Father tend to the poor, continents and oceans away. I have not seen them in four full years, but seeing you keeps me going.
Despite what others say, you are not inanimate or lifeless. For me, you are a shelter of comfort, a trove of knowledge and an organic catalyst for lifelong learning; fertilizing ideas, aiding the sprout and blossom of innovations, and egging on minds to re-evaluate beliefs of politics and society. People in past civilizations have tried to burn your predecessor, fearing education may backfire against their personal vile. All of that because you are powerful, you are important, and you are necessary. You are the book, the beautiful soul, smiling for centuries to come.
Sincerely,
T.
Even though you and I do not share any dregs of DNA, I often think of you as my third parent -the way you are nurturing yet strict, provocative yet calming. You speak to me inaudibly in creative metaphors, action words and clusters of compacted idioms but I hear your voice loudly and clearly ringing through the folds of my brain as it seeps into my mind, and settles into my thoughts like a sprinkling of sawdust pulled into cohesion by the brawny arms of gravity. Your voice serves a multi-dimensional purpose: instigative at times, often invocatory, while wrapping me up in threads of emotions uncoiling, as if, from a spindle. You can bring joy and sadness within matter of minutes, alternating like a pendulum bob, through a simple act of comprehension; the edges of your alphabets dripping with beads of melancholia or whiffs and rinds of celebration. Contained within you is the spectrum of emotionality that remains couched behind the darkness of India ink, behind stretches of sentences with colons and apostrophes, and the devised anatomy of paragraphs. Reading through your skin, the bouquet of sentences, reveals the contents of your guts, your past history, the traces of your genealogy, and the messages you harness. You teach without sounds, you speak without lips and stay reliable through the storms of adolescence and adulthood, that brew and strengthen and accumulate with time, experience and inconsolable tragedy.
Holding you, or even just seeing you standing on the wood shelf, brings back memories from a long time ago. Betty D. adopted you from the local thrift store for seventy-five cents and brought you back to my parents house in a charcoal-colored plastic bag. I clothed you that afternoon in a brown paper skirt, combed around the sleeves and polished the semicircular ribbing spread across your spine, listening to the songs of rain pattering on the grass outside. For the next several days, I sat out on the patio and read your words, swelling up with emotions along the way. When Mother and Father went out for work for large stretches of time, delivering babies and suturing amputees, I would place my head on your firm paper body and tilt my ears to the side, hoping to hear sounds of vowels shuffling across your weighty stack. It would bring me joy, and comfort and solace in a way no other thing or person could. I never felt lonely with just your company, because you educated me, made me think, and challenged my beliefs. I clutched on to you the night Grandmother died, wriggling and squirming in her bed as emphysema gnawed away the bulbs of her alveoli. It brought comfort to me and a sense of closure. I took you in my book bag my first day of college, knowing I could talk to you if no one else did. And I surrounded myself with stencils of your words when people dismissed my sexuality. I have felt coupled to you all along because of your quality to fascinate me alongside your patience, your gentleness and kind demeanor. I romanticized, as a child, a future with you. And sometimes I feel that little has changed, even after seventeen long years.
A lot of people completely underestimate your personality. They look at you pityingly or objectify you completely or treat you as just a book. They ignore your body smells, your own pattern of aging and the fact that you bruise easily. They miss the the sound of flutter rushing across your leaves, fail to observe the bends and turns along the blunted rims of your abdomen, and gloss over the personal memories you evoke just by being you. They make bags out of your scales, decorative pieces for their homes, or sometimes even fashionable garments -immune to the sounds of your cries or your unconventional lisp, as they break open your rib cage or yank out your extremities. Since today is the age of convenience, portability and efficiency, a fair share of consumers have decided to digitalize you. They will preserve your words behind the rhomboid of an illuminated screen and access your outer casing through buttons and switches. All your friends and peers will be given shelter in the memory chip of the same device, categorized under file names. And you will vanish from the tangible to an abstract intangible, accessible only through puddles of liquid crystals fractionating and colliding on the interface of skin and glass. The feel of your follicles, the unevenness of your skin, the aroma of the non-multiplicative dead cells polygon-ed across each page -somehow they will not matter. The possibility of doodling and hand writing notes beside arcs of black typescript will not be relevant. Being able to flip through the sheaf of your constituents or laughing to your narratives with balls of spittle flying in heightened trajectory and landing on your laminated coverlet are deemed optional and unimportant. So, you are re-formatted by the know-it-all tycoons and publishers and book company magnates and electrocuted; militarized in a way, and made to be uniform.
I am thinking of the time you were used as a weapon, flung to my head out of a fit of rage. The time you were hidden from my mahogany shelf, serving as a repercussion for my rebellion and disobedience. But there was also that time when I leaned on your shoulder after receiving twenty rejection letters from professional school applications. I relish at your mysteries in the front car of the subway, as the rest of the commuters titter away to paradoxes of comedy clubs. You are my prized possession as I walk around the park, while the residents of the city glamorize for television, doll-up like marionettes wired to culture, and sparkle like rhinestones in cages of mirrors. Most importantly, you are like a parent -a role-model of tolerance, a constant companion and a person of reliance, as Mother and Father tend to the poor, continents and oceans away. I have not seen them in four full years, but seeing you keeps me going.
Despite what others say, you are not inanimate or lifeless. For me, you are a shelter of comfort, a trove of knowledge and an organic catalyst for lifelong learning; fertilizing ideas, aiding the sprout and blossom of innovations, and egging on minds to re-evaluate beliefs of politics and society. People in past civilizations have tried to burn your predecessor, fearing education may backfire against their personal vile. All of that because you are powerful, you are important, and you are necessary. You are the book, the beautiful soul, smiling for centuries to come.
Sincerely,
T.
