Bookmarks

It’s rare for me to start and finish a book in one sitting. I’ll read for a while, then set it aside, leaving the bookmark to hold my place for when I next pick up the story. Usually I’ll open the book again hours or, at longest, days later. But sometimes a book returns to my shelf unfinished, the bookmark still secure between the pages. Most often I will have been distracted by a different book, gotten caught up in another story. Yet every once in a while, it’s because I’m not ready to know what will happen on the book’s last page.

Years later I’ll open the book again, starting the story over with a new bookmark to measure my progress. My old bookmark remains in place, until I’ve read beyond where I last left the story behind. Then, I’ll keep the two bookmarks together until the book no longer needs a place keeper at all. My bookmarks are mostly ticket stubs or photographs, memories or items conveniently at hand. Sometimes when I come back to a book, I’ll find two places marked with mementos, like snapshots from years passed by.

I have a book on my shelf that I’ve removed many times. Holding it in my hands, I’ll again memorize the beautiful cover. A design of simple words, colors, and polaroids that create a subtle sparkle. I breathe in the aging pages; my fingers slowly searching the smooth surface for the dents and ripples of time. I always return it to its place on the shelf unopened, not ready to return to the story held in its pages.

It was never meant to be my book. Though, I guess I’ve had it long enough now that it probably is. Borrowed from a bookshelf long ago, it has someone else’s name written inside the cover. The book was a seventeenth birthday gift from a father to a daughter; a relic left behind from a well-worn tradition. 

The edges of the soft cover are fraying slightly. Some of the pages are customized with black ballpoint ink. The book’s owner underlined her favorite places. She left single word notes and exclamations in the white spaces of margins. The ink tells its own story alongside the typed words, written in the familiar handwriting of a girl frozen in time. It’s her book that I keep on my shelf. The only things I consider mine about it are the mementos I’ve left between its pages. 

Today I pulled it from my shelf and held it in my hands, a new bookmark pressed between my thumb and the book’s cover. Opening it for the first time in years, I flipped through it gently to see my old memories hiding inside. Four mementos marking three different places, a story started four times but never yet finished. A photo and a ticket stub nestled together indicating that I the last time I started, I made it further than the second to last time.

I brought the book with me outside, to the shaded comfort of my front porch steps. There was a soft breeze and birds chirping under a blue summer sky, creating a backdrop perfect for getting lost in the pages of a well-written book. Not for the first time, I started to read the story of a single summer day with notes in the margins. Notes written by a curly haired girl with subtly sparkling brown eyes.

Set aside again, the book is holding five mementos between its pages. Two photographs, two ticket stubs, and a business card from a Thai restaurant on an island far away. Maybe one day it will hold even more of my memories inside before it holds none. Well, the book has held the mementos long enough that I’ll always let it hold onto one.

A train ticket stub from a trip long since passed. I’ll leave it as something for me to rediscover the next time I pull the book from my shelf. A seventeen dollar journey taken by a seventeen year old girl. A trip to celebrate a twentieth birthday for the curly haired girl. A reminder of a wonderful memory from a birthday celebration we never knew would be the last.