A novel sits on my shelf untouched for almost half my life. I’ve unpacked it through many moves since picking it up excitedly as a teen. I promise myself I will get to it someday, as I have done for years. But someday never comes. It stares at me while I choose anything but it.
I scroll my laptop one night while it sits near me, still. I curse myself for being too damn lazy to read such an ordinary book. Why am I unwilling to admit I will never read it, why won’t I let go and donate it with the rest? When an unconsidered question appears in my head as if it’s asked by another. A sudden theory that can be quickly answered. I just have to know when this book is from, when exactly it was bought for me from the display at the little shop in Lake Forest.
I open its untouched pages, very yellowed from a decade and half, for the precise answer to my mystery. I scan the copyright page.
I confirm the book’s publishing date. It’s as I wondered. I got the book just before our world fell apart. I realize the book had to have been the one I picked out to be that summer’s indulgent read.
I reminisce on the eagerness that a new book once used to bring me, the anticipation of that world I would soon get to explore. Way back when summers were wildly carefree, simply filled with expectant daydreams.
So the the book sits in my room, years later, heavy from the teenage dreams still suspended in it.
It stands there as a symbol of my unseen life.
Of the story of years ahead I’d dreamed for myself, left unread.
Of my hopes for all the “some days” and “one day,” that simply vanished into thin air that June evening when life as I knew it ceased to exist.
Of all that is avoided because it weighs too much to face, but too much to let go.
