15th
One bookshelf down, two to go…
The only time I regret being a bibliophile is when it comes time to pack up and move again.
Years upon years of books are now stacked in irregular brown boxes in my bedroom. But they’re more than just books now, aren’t they?
A boy I was falling for at the end of a Spring semester traded book lists with me to read over that summer. I tried, but I just couldn’t get even halfway through Journey to the End of the Night. Light Years, however, reminded me of everything I loved best about F. Scott Fitzgerald, but updated, more modern. Both went in a box.
I used to dog sit for a poet. I stayed at her tiny apartment in an old tenement building in the Lower East Side. I spent weekends walking Rosie through Tompkins Square Park, scanning her bookshelves for pulp lesbian erotica, flipping through her extensive Rolodex. I first stayed over an Easter weekend. She typed out a letter, signed a copy of Maxfield Parrish (the inscription: from one Irish Catholic girl to another), and left a crisp twenty on the kitchen counter. The next time, she scrawled out a hasty note and left me five dollars. All of that went in a box.
A red hardbound collection of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales I picked up in Denmark? A Main Street paperback my mom got for my seventeenth birthday and I still haven’t read (although, during the most recent election and all the references to Sinclair Lewis’s tome, I considered finally picking it up)? Michelle Tea’s slim Passionate Mistakes I bought at St. Mark’s Books and read in one sitting at that bagel/pizza place? All of Street Angel and Marvel 1602 and Blue Monday’s Lovecats and the last issues of Bone all purchased from a burly man named Wayne at a little comic book store in Pittsburgh (he like a BPRD patch on a big blue hoodie I pilfered from an old boyfriend, I liked that he kept a mailbox for me, even though I only read 3 or 4 comics on the regular)? I cried in my grandmother’s bedroom reading that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the first time. My Anna Karenina is falling apart. Frank O’Hara’s collected poems are well marked up and dogeared. Motherless Brooklyn is mysteriously water damaged. I somehow acquired two copies of Bright Lights, Big City. All of these went in a box.
My sister asked me, as I was packing, if I was going to keep all my books. I didn’t even think of the alternative. It would be like leaving my arm behind, or giving my leg to someone else to walk around with.
