When I was younger, I used to write my name in my books. On the title page, the inside cover, I penned the letters in blue or black and sometimes purple because I was feeling adventurous. As if this informal claim made the book mine. As if those words were mine and the author wrote them especially for me. As if that’s exactly what I was going to say if I were to write that story.
On the dedication, it read: For -blank- when it should have been my name because who else would read those words so carefully and cry and laugh and smile and become angry for the characters who touched my heart or broke it. Those books were meant for me.
And now, I open each book, with the realization that each and every word was a part of me and my name simply was a sign of how I evolved. From the scrawl that came from that oversized Ticonderoga in my copies of The Cat in the Hat and The Rainbow Fish whose one shiny scale I pretended was like my one crooked tooth to the books by Mary Pope Osborne and my “M”s were sharp arches and my “G”s still looked like my first grade writing assignments. I dwelled in those books and they helped me grow and I wrote my name in them to let people know that these books are mine, not yours. They are MY treasures, my bricks of gold, that the author had typed in ink not only on paper but on my heart.
And now, I am 18 looking back at worlds that seeped into my dreams and those words turned into water and wind that washed over my soul and filled it with love in distant lands, war with different species, faeries that visited in the dawn and didn’t like the color red.
My name isn’t written in my copies of the Bhagavad Gita or A Short Introduction to Buddhism. There isn’t a hint of my name in the inside cover of Descarte’s Meditations or even in Tolkien’s tales about elves and hobbits because they aren’t mine to claim. Those heart-wrenching moments and happy endings aren’t mine nor will they ever be mine and I must have fallen in love hundreds of times only to have my heart broken at the turn of the last page. A bittersweet romance.
Those books are long gone, however. In libraries and gone from the bins of donations across my home county so that the children can see my scrawls and perhaps know how much joy those words had brought to me. But I want those books to be theirs too. I want them not only to write their names within the pages but to realize that those stories aren’t theirs either.
I want those children to grow up with their books, and wholeheartedly be able to find another child and hand them a story that fills their hearts with joy and wonder and instead of having their hearts broken be able to break away from the last page and smile. As if they’re looking forward to the next time they fall in love instead of writing their names and claiming the pieces of their broken heart.
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