i am all bluster. i am not violent. i am not malicious. i am a result.

a connection with some pages. not in the same way the pages are connected to the spine, but in the way that your own spine seems reliant on that book. as if you couldn't exist without those words existing. a friendship with a book, that makes you seem either clinically insane or juvenile through the eyes of others'. a friendship which sits cross-legged in the sun and waits for you. where your bookmark can sit in the exact place it left off, and you can pick the relationship back up where it was without any awkward conversation, hesitation, fumbled words in the mouth. just a quick resume. a quick feel of the paper to ensure that its fibres are still in place, but slowly diminishing. as if you were taking on the fibre it was losing and enmeshing it into your self. but in a less childish, crazy, cheesy way than that.

my book that offers me a piece of me has been read 17 times over. it came to me during a time of disintegration, when i was looking for something to uphold me and keep my spine from turning to butter. it was a divorce, and it was ugly. there was nowhere to go, with the walls of my house hunched under the weight of my parents' spiteful words. there seemed to be nothing worse than watching the two people who brought you into this world become less mature than you. so i ran. not to other, less angry houses; not to drugs like any 16-year old delinquent would; and not to God, who seemed far away from a house where my own demons slept. i ran to the pages of a book that talked about world war ii, which seemed a lot worse than my own situation. it was the book thief. the book thief. and unknowingly, it would involve all 3 elements which i did not run literally to. it's a novel about some germans hiding a jew, an unfolding love story between 10-year old best friends, and the colours of death. it has all the similar components of any typical nazi-era novel, but this one is different. not because it has some seemingly personal relationship with me, but because it's narrated by death. death, who is tired and worn down and pities humans, and not the death with an unending appetite and black cloak that we're used to. just when i thought i had no voice in my situation there was death, in the middle of a genocide, with a voice. i initially read, reread, and read again this book as an escape. a way to get out from all the chaosness i now call my teenagehood. but now i read the book thief to feel that all again. to feel that naivety that words could be so simple as to solve all the world's problems in a day. i know that i can go somewhere that makes me feel like a 16-year old who found security and protection. it makes me feel wise, and youthful, and independent all at once. i think the words from the book speak for me best. "if only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread out on top of it"