Caught Somewhere in Time: Of Battered Paperbacks

 I've always been one of those people who stay up late reading and I'm currently reading Shibumi. The copy I have is a secondhand one, possibly stolen by my father from a library. And earlier today, as I was  heating up dinner, I happened to encounter a spirit in my house, a harmless one that stopped by to say hello and is now nestling in the bookshelves, possibly reading Isabel Allende.

I have been seeing ghosts and reading paperbacks since I was a child. I have scribbled stories about them on paper, on napkins and now on digital canvases like this blog. There are plenty of paperbacks in this house and plenty of memories about the people to whom those books belonged to as well. 

There is a certain charm to opening a volume and seeing my grandmother's scrawled dedication in it to me. Off the cuff, I remember my copy of Asterix the Legionnaire has a dedication scrawled on it. The pages have turned yellow now though.

It makes me think sometimes, like an itch in the back of my head that I can't seem to scratch: Is a book I found in a shelf in my house there for a reason or by accident? Is it a book my father liked but my grandmother adored? Is it a book my mother hated and I worship?

This house is full of memories in the form of books. It is caught somewhere in time, smelling of vanilla essence and freshly made coffee and in it lives a reader and his father, silently reading. 

There is something curiously intimate about this house and it has a library that records the people that came to stay in it, the people whose memories and whose future can be found in the books it has in it.

The Bilge Master