She was one of those girls
Who you’d probably walk right past
Because all you would see of her
Are her hands holding the book
Containing the stories,
The fantasies that separated her world from yours.
She was one of those girls
Who loved books so much that she became one,
Tattooing beautiful strings of words
With oceans of meaning
Crashing onto her skin in black ink like waves onto a shore.
But she was careful about it
Only giving meaning to the places the world could not see
Because she knew
The best books never exposed
All its secrets, its twists and turns.
They had to be discovered.
Each layer had to be revealed slowly
By the ones who cared enough to finish.
So she kept the words hidden under sheets of fabric
Hoping one day someone would come along
To peel the layers off
And find the words that meant the most to her
The words she thought defined her
Because
She was one of those girls
Who thought that your favourite quotation
Provided the best basis for deduction
She thought it was the easiest way
To unravel the threads of an already fraying personality
Waiting to be unearthed, waiting to be freed
She was one of those girls
Who didn’t have a single bookshelf in her home
Because it didn’t make sense to coerce
Her most prized possessions
The pieces of her soul
To stand on cold wooden shelves
When they deserved to be cradled in her arms
She was one of those girls
Who read and reread
Then reread again
Until the spines of her books were as worn as her own
Damaged from nights of hunched over escapes
To her fictional worlds
She was one of those girls
Who waited for one of those boys
And one of those adventures
That would revolutionise her life and change it forever.
But she was also one of those girls
Who didn’t need anything more
Than the literature that sang to her soul.
