Monday, July 22, 2013

A monologue about owning books and other thoughts from moi


It was missing for about two years and then I found out.
Actually, it was sitting on the green, small table next to my dad's couch in the basement, underneath a notebook and another book.
Keep in mind that once, I had been desperately seeking out this book, and then had to settle with the notion that I must have sold it or given it away.
I had no inkling that I would find it.
It reminds me of that line from the Order of the Phoenix movie when Harry looks up at Luna's shoes, her Converse shoes hanging by their laces as put their by bullies, having been lost for quite some time, and then his friend Luna says "Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect."
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That reminds me, I've been rereading the Harry Potter series.
I don't know why really. I decided early September or October last year that I was going to freaking do it, one way or another, and then from there I slowly made the assumption that I would streak through them in the heat of summer. Every time I heard a blasted reference or read an amazing gif analysis on Tumblr, I reminded myself that I was going to read this series no matter what and finally remember everything that I needed to remember about the books that were once so dear to my heart.
They weren't that dear to my heart as much anymore. They were dear to my memory and my childhood, but present (at the time) 16 year old Danah hadn't reread (I "read" the series for the first time in 4th or 5th grade? So everything has been a reread since) any of the books in the series since the very last time she was in Syria, which was right before freshman year. I'd lugged three pound copies of the Deathly Hallows and the Half-blood prince, and risked (and received) a gigantic library fee only a few years earlier for bringing a library copy of the Order of the Phoenix with me.
But I had no bond with them, you know? High school changes you, alot, and you start thinking about other things and reading other things and you lose interest in a series you put alot of stake in.
So I decided to put a stake in them.
I didn't even pick them up purposefully at first. It was mid-July, I had nothing integral to do, and...I knew I should. So I pushed through every book, pushing past through Harry's adolescent years in a matter of days, and tolling through Harry's teenage years.
And boy, they reminded me of my own (still going) ones.
It's really freaking weird.
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So I'm sitting in my bed, with two books I'd never really though I'd read together. One is a relic of my childhood, a book bought the day after its release (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) that's older than several of my cousins, and then there's the sleek, old copy of Looking For Alaska that I thought was gone but wasn't really gone, but hiding in my house this entire time.
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It's strange how books start to have their own appearance to you. You love a book long enough, and you start to see that copy of the book, that bundle of pages in your hands, as something other than the countless editions you find in Barnes and Noble or you find online.
Which is why I'll never buy a new edition of the Fault In Our Stars. My copy might be temporarily lost, out on the outskirts and hopefully returning to me because of a bad lend, but hopefully it'll come back. Because that edition, torn and ugly and not as sleek as it was at the start, is still my bright blue book that I got signed by the author. It's still my book.
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Yeah.

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