Borrowed

All my life I’ve tried to keep things meant to be borrowed.

A few years ago, my dad called to tell me that he had cleaned out my room in the place I think he imagines I call “home”. He said nothing about anything he unearthed in that mausoleum other than the fact that he finally returned all of the library books I “bought” by keeping them for years. He called it a donation, but I don’t think that’s how diaspora works; those words went home to their holy land after wandering decades in the desert of what I couldn’t let go.

I probably couldn’t, still. Which is why he had to do it for me. Almost always someone else has to do it for you, don’t they? Someone almost always has to leave or die or tell you they never really loved you in the first place for you to put them back. Someone almost always has to take themselves where they belong on your behalf for you to remember you haven’t actually paid for a damn thing, and humans don’t have hardback covers to write your name inside of. And sometimes no one does it; sometimes the house just burns down and turns everything to ash and dust and iron, anyway.

My dad probably doesn’t understand why I can’t call it home. It’s been around long enough, I just don’t think of those walls that way. They were one in a roster, a revolving door of unfamiliar, unsettled space. And I think maybe I held onto the little things for a sense of something that would stay. I think that’s why I kept those books on the shelf long after it was fair.

Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I had a place I could disappear to on purpose. I imagine it like having the power to make yourself into a poltergeist at will — a displaced soul that finds something to remain with, something to contain them and stable them when there’s nowhere else for them to go, no place for them in that in between. Not quite living, not quite leaving.

But it all started with the library. I was seventeen and some mornings I would wake up and just know I wasn’t ready to be seen. I had recently started driving so I was meeting the autonomy of arriving on my own terms for the first time. I would leave my house and drive the main road in the direction of my school, but take a right turn and end up in the public library parking lot instead. I would walk inside and head straight for the back corner with a hidden couch, grabbing the same book every time: Ray Bradbury’s, “Let’s All Kill Constance”.

It was the cover that got me. Wild colors, art deco design, the figure of a woman standing naked in front of a three-panel mirror, her reflection bouncing back at her as three different women. Something about it spoke. Well, that and my mother’s name. After three years of abuse, I had finally escaped her house a month before, and I won’t tell you there wasn’t something cathartic about that title in the midst of my pain.

So there I would sit and read until I was ready — for what, I still don’t know. Maybe until I felt understood enough that I could rejoin the living. Maybe I needed those words because I hadn’t learned how to have any of my own yet — at least ones that could explain why I felt like I desperately needed to disappear. I mean, have you ever heard of a high schooler playing hooky just to hide in a library?

But in that library was Constance Rattigan, being told to hold still and exclaiming in response that men have told her that all her life — right before they drive a knife through her heart. And it was like lightening on the inside. I no longer needed to be found, I was too busy being seen. And ever since, as soon as someone tells me to stay still, I start running because I know they’ll stab me as soon as I do.

———

I’m still terribly selfish about them, borrowed books. I’m always anxious about giving them back, and I don’t know why. Maybe I’m worried someone else will discover them and love them and call them their favorite and somehow it will make my love less. And yet, they just sit on my shelf. It’s horrifying how little I actually read them, I just need to know that they’re there. I hate that it makes me nothing more than a collector — of books, of people.

I’m terribly selfish about them. I’m afraid to give them back. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m worried someone else will discover them and love them and call them their favorite and somehow it will make my love less, our time less, our touch less. Subtracting more than I am willing to lose and so I pretend I don’t ever have to. I pretend I don’t ever have to lose.

How funny, though: the ones that meant the most, like the books I was willing to disappear for — I would never take them with me. I never checked them out. I just folded the pages and left them there, like breadcrumbs. Like I was giving myself something to come back for.

In primary school, we had one library day per week. And the deal was that if you didn’t bring back your book from the week before, you weren’t allowed to check out another one. Instead, you had to sit on these giant beanbags and read magazines until everyone else was finished scouring the shelves for their new treasure. The beanbags were positioned right in the middle of the room, at the top of the stairs, sandwiched between the shelves and the checkout counter and I have to suspect that both the placement and the procedure were intended to politely shame us into returning what wasn’t ours.

I never felt shame, though; I always felt proud, like I had a secret. That all of these other suckers in my class had to start over with a whole new set of pages filled with a whole new set of characters, landscapes, and ideas; and I got to go home that night to what was easy and familiar and steadily becoming real to me. I was willing to read Cat Fancy for an hour every week in order to get to keep the one thing that was finally becoming real to me. I didn’t mind being different because I knew I was going to go home to what I had held onto.

What’s funny, though, is that now that I’m older I know exactly how it feels to be kept long after you should have been given back. Once in my life someone claimed to love me, so they believed they were required to need me. And it felt exactly like being left at home on library day, like being set on a shelf and never really touched, never actually opened and devoured.

I know how it feels to be collected, and how it’s actually impossible to love something and control it, or even think you should, at the same time. And if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that life is not much more than a constant conflict between desiring what is off limits and being repulsed by what tries to possess you. You’re either stocking your shelf or trying your damnedest to escape from somebody else’s.

I know how it feels to experience someone trying to absorb you within them — and how when you let them, your own voice echoes back at you reminding you of how hollow the space is that you occupy now. I know how it feels to need to take a right turn off the main road in order to find somewhere wide open enough for you to scream and not have the sound bounce back at you from the ribcage of another being. They put you in there, and for a little while you let them because they said they loved you so you weren’t allowed to leave. They wanted you to stay exactly on the shelf where they set you, but all you wanted was to go somewhere you wouldn’t be found. All you wanted was to unfold every page and disappear.