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 **** 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 ****** 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.
**** diamonds, **** flowers, **** songs, **** baby animals, **** anything trivial you could ever give me as a girl. **** all that **** other women like. Give me a book, a story, a poem, a letter, and i'll remember you forever.