Two men have given me books in my lifetime... up to this moment. I wish more had. When I graze my fingers horizontally along the spines of each story shoved into my shelves only two books cause them to stop and linger. A book is such an underrated gift.
The first boy to give me a book knows a side of me that no one else does. I talk to him constantly despite the distance, yet I can't save him. He has an addictive personality. It's the drugs, it's the alcohol, it's the sadness, it's the tortured creativeness in him, it's the live life fast anarchism of fuck the world. I've been careless with the book he gave me. It has sat neglected for a long time, I haven't even finished it. I've tried but I just can't get into it. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as you can tell from the title it is all about taking mad amounts of LSD while living during the 70s and following around a bunch of now famous bands and being wild and being untethered from social constraints. He gave me a piece of his freedom fetish that intimidates me because I know deep down that if we're together we'd tear through the world in a feverish pace. So fast that there's no way we could live a decent life without having burned up everything we could ever do that it'd have to die tragically and quickly.
The second boy gave me a bittersweet love story set in a world filled with magic. It's characters had tattoos of protection symbols, strange powers, and a girl in love with a boy who pissed her off but was gorgeous in a bad way. The boy who gave me this story hid behind his tattoos and made me promise to not fall in love with him during our first date. I read the novel nonstop and finished it two days later. He gave me the sequel with the stipulation that I give away these books whenever I was done with them to someone I thought would truly appreciate them. I cried after the second book and like the story's main characters we couldn't get pass our self-made obstacles to make our love work. For a year I refused to pass them on for it was one of the few things I had left of this boy. Until the day I sat by an army officer on the plane home and he was almost done with the first novel and I coincidentally had the second novel. It was just too coincidental to pass up on so I gave the man a story to carry with him. A story he didn't even know was deeper than the words on the pages. I still have the first book and always will just like the tiny, faint, tender pink scar he left in my heart.
Fuck diamonds, fuck flowers, fuck songs, fuck baby animals, fuck anything trivial you could ever give me as a girl. Fuck all that shit other women like. Give me a book, a story, a poem, a letter, and i'll remember you forever.