Here is my response to Thoughts on Toast‘s writing prompt: “If you could bookmark life”. It took its own turns, as writing prompts are meant to do, and doesn’t actually include any bookmarks. Hope you enjoy it!

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My finger slides from one book to the next in a library of hard and soft covers, new and old. This place is my haven, my core. Spiraling books as high as the eye can see. But I can’t reach them all. My ladder is only so tall, and so much is out of my reach. Beautiful old books with secrets I may never know, too far away, and yet right within eyesight, within yearning’s distance.

I settle for what I can reach.

A faded red book, hard cover made softer from constant use, threads protruding from the edges. The pages are thick, their corners crinkled and fuzzy. The words say things I already know. The font and spacing is irrelevant. But the fact that it’s there, that I can open that red book any time…it’s priceless.

A black book with a lime green border, soft cover. The glossy front is new and seemingly untouched, and yet I understand every nuance of what it offers. I have read it and will read it until the day I die, and its contents will still be relevant and necessary.

I roll the ladder to another section of books. I can reach five shelves without the ladder, ten shelves with it. But there are enumerable shelves above the ones I can reach, the volumes of books thicker, taller, more detailed. The depths of their contents are not things I can understand from their spines; their titles are virtually unreadable to me. I am a novice, an eager learner of all these waiting shelves have to offer. And the only way to reach the books I yearn for is to write my own and rewrite my own based on what I’ve read until I just barely touch on what it takes to understand the next shelf. And when I get there, there is a book with which to start and a book with which to finish. There is a page on which I must begin and an epilogue with which I must end. And each and every book is just the beginning of the next and the next.

I am eager to begin.

And begin again.