youth

05 \\ spines

"If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are." - Rosemarie Urquico

                                                               ✧  ✧ ✧

The first time I went into your apartment, I thought you were in the process of unpacking. Even though I knew that you'd been living here for a year already. You opened the door and stepped inside, walking straight through the hall as if it was nothing unusual. But it was certainly more than unusual. Right inside the door there were stacks of books lining the walls. There were some only five books tall whilst others towered above me by at least two feet. They were like drunken soldiers, caught unaware and called to attention by their general. Sloppy and seemingly unorganized two piles would lean onto another and then merge near the top, next to them one tower of books seemed precariously tilted towards me and next to that one tower of books seemed to be made up of only paper and no covers in between.

Past the hall I could hear you moving about, little noises that clattered out the steps of your routine upon returning home. I wanted to watch your routine, let myself sink a little deeper into the quick sand that is you, but the forest of books had me turning and crouching and straining my neck to try and read just some of the titles. Emma, A Clockwork Orange, Animal Farm, The Bourne Identity, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4, Galapagos, The Silence of the Lambs, Before, Breakfast of Champions, To Kill a Mockingbird - these were the only titles that sparked some recognition in my head out of all the spines I looked at. I was amazed at the range of books you had, at the amount of books you had, at the sheer fact that throughout the whole the only thing there was books. Book, carpet and wallpaper.

"Are you coming?" It was your voice, pulling my head away from a broken spine as I tried to read a title that had long ago been rubbed away.

"Yeah." I left the books, walking down the hall carefully - as if I was trying not to disturb the books. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't walked away straight away. If you had had to come and get me but instead of leaving we would have spent the rest of the evening in your hall way, guessing at worn away titles, reading chapters to each other and me ultimately finding more about you. But you had called and, as always, I went.

The next room you led me to was just as captivating as your hallway. It was your kitchen but also your photo album. On the fridge magnets held up Polaroids and ticket stubs; on the cupboards there were more photos and as I looked I could see your life stuck up on the walls around me like an exhibit. An exhibit I was entering for free and without a guide. There you were; dressed up as a vampire for Halloween at eight years old; you giving the middle finger to the person holding the camera at sixteen; you being held by your father at nine months; you grinning with four girls at eighteen; you sleeping on the couch at twelve; you on your first day of kindergarten, looking both shit-scared and excited. It is your life documented in photos and concert tickets and bus stubs and subway passes and certificates… it is your life as I have entered and intruded upon it.

"I'd say take a photo, they last longer but these are all mine." That was what you said to me before grabbing my hand and leading me out of the kitchen. They are yours; moments in time that make up your life captured by a stranger I will never meet. Even

you, in the photos, is a stranger. In them you are not the girl I knew then or the girl I know now. You have changed since then; you no longer dress up as a vampire for Halloween and it has been a while since you slept on your stomach. You have changed and evolved and been erased and been redrawn. Sometimes I helped to hold the pencil but is was then that I realized that if I ever guided the eraser across you I would hate myself.

You hadn't seen the affect of the photos on me - or maybe you had, I couldn't tell then whether or not you were just pretending to not notice things - and were so nonchalant as you led me through the labyrinth of your apartment. The living room with a couch covered in blankets of all colors and records and books and cassettes littered around on shelves and tables and in piles. The study that was as small as my bathroom with just a desk and chair squeezed in. The bathroom that had a smashed mirror and a jar of dead spiders perched on a narrow shelf. The bedroom that had a bed with only a mattress, sleeping bag and blanket on it. The bedroom that was so filled with records, books, cassettes, posters, papers, cameras, bags, clothes, notebooks and coke bottles that it seemed as if you would have to jump to get to your bed every night. The balcony that overlooked a street filled with sympathy but no empathy and shops selling nothing but hateful relief.

I didn't know what to think. You had invited me into your home and shown me some of the rawest parts of yourself with no curator to tell me how to understand it. You left me stranded among an apartment of everything and you. It was youth at its comfiest but youth at its most mysterious.

I didn't know that you fell asleep in the hallway with a book in your hands and a blanket over your shoulders. I didn't know then that you danced in your underwear to records at noon with the curtains closed. You lived there with so much fucking ambivalence and life.