Through the Page

42 days.

It has been 42 days since she sat me down here and left.

42 days since last opened me.

Or closed me.

42 since she last touched me at all or even looked in my direction.

42 whole entire days since she took my aching spine off the shelf and cracked my covers to reveal my insides, pasty pale and blank, aching for her flowery scrawl to grace another page,

And in this time alone I've grown impatient and angry but only the way dogs are angry when they weather shoes with their teeth, carnal gnashing bringing them closer to their masters in the only way they can control from inside the home.

But I have no teeth to gnash, nor access to her shoes to destroy. I'm not even entirely sure how to move.

It would be so much easier.

if she would just

MOVE me.

She was interested in me once, when we first started out. I was a present from someone she called Aunt Barb and my first pages say it all. From how serious she thought my dark black cover was and how it grew on her to how little she liked school and how much she preferred art to almost anything else. Those early times were spent with her writing every day for at least an hour, jotting down the fine little details of her day and her innermost thoughts. Poetry happened sometimes, too, showing off her advanced vocabulary and gift for making the words flow. Many of the passionate pieces were about something she called Henry that sat near her in Algebra.

If I could have talked to her, I would have asked what a Henry was. Or an Algebra. None of it made sense to me, but they were her words so I loved them all the same. I only knew what was on my pages.

or what she added.

How I wished she would add something, anything, to me.

I felt her words and their magical mass on my pages as I ran my thoughts over them, trying to ignore the time ticking by.

The warmth of another day began to fade from my cover.

One more lonely day was coming to an end.

Just as I sighed to myself

a terrible sound

came storming

toward the room.

The door slammed open, banging against the wall. If I had been able to move freely, I would have fallen over in shock. Then again, if I could do that, I would have flung myself from the shelf forty-one days ago.

I am not a patient book.

But now I wouldn't have to be. Someone was here.

And someone was angry.

The figure stormed into the room and it took me a minute to recognize her. She had come through every one of those forty-two days and walked right past me. Sometimes she was tired and dragged her feet to her bed while other times she bounced through the room like something she called a rabbit. At least she said something about them bouncing and I assumed they bounced like her. How many ways to bounce could there be?

This approach was different though. She wasn't happy or tired, and her anger burned hot even from a distance. I was starting to feel bad for her when she turned a rage-fueled eyes to the bookshelf and landed on me.

No. I thought quietly. I mean yes, I want this but no, not like this. The fury in her movements scared me as she stomped over to stand in front and stare. It looked like she was thinking about it.

No. I silently begged. Not today. Not when you're mad. Use me when you're happy. Write bout the good days, not whatever this is.

Her hand reached up toward me and I was torn between my fear of her fury and my aching longing for her touch.

I didn't have long to wait between fear and longing as my cover was soon in her fist, being yanked down with enough force that I was surprised I had not broken or bent when I connected with the desk below.

A few seconds later, she was thumbing through my pages, stopping every few to read back over some old memory. The noise she made with her mouth wasn't like the happy little squeaks she usually made when reading me, but she wasn't in her normal way, either. She was wild and angry and bitter.

And I was scared.

If I had not been a book, I would have been sweating in her hands for fear alone, but she always explained sweat as wet and stinky, and I didn't feel like being wet and stinky even if I was terrified,

Instead, I stayed tense and afraid as she turned the pages more and more roughly, almost ripping me as she scoffed at her own writing.

Then it happened. She stopped and stared at one page in particular, reading it over and over as her eyes moved over the lines on the page, all the way down and back to the top.

"That's it.," she said out loud and her voice had so little in common with her normal sounds that I had to look more closely at her face to make sure she was really herself.

She was, just an angry, sad and bitter version,

She used her fingers to separate that page from the ones behind it and reached for the top.

Please don't. I whispered to myself. I knew she couldn't hear me but I had to try.

Her right first tightened over the top of the page.

Please don't! I begged. She didn't hear it. She didn't feel it.

PLEASE DON'T! I said again, loud as I could think it. Her fist tightened.

PLEASE DON'T!!!! I shouted with all the power I had left.

And her grip, as if by miracle, loosened.

"What?" she whispered, shock stealing over the rage.

It was only then that I felt it.

The words.

I thought them so hard that I made them.

I made them real, on my page.

In the middle of this page where she had previously written at length about her love of Henry, new words appeared in the only blank space, across the very top, in letters as bold as any declaration of love she had made inside of me:

PLEASE DON'T!!!!

"What the..." she started, the shock pulling her closer to her old self. I was so relieved that her hand had stopped trying to rip me apart that I didn't have time to prepare for the next blow.

Her fist was at the top of my open pages again, but instead of gripping one, she gripped everything under the words I had thought to her. Thought at her? The words I had burned into existence on my very flesh? My words. She grabbed me by the words and flung.

For a second, I was with her, and for a second I was flying, not sure of how or when or why to stop. Then I was smacking against the wall and bouncing back onto the bed where I lay motionless, feeling my cover for damage as soon as the shock wore off.

I didn't expect to talk to her. I didn't expect her to try to rip me. I didn't expect her to throw me, either.

I guess I didn't know what to expect. The door slammed open again as I found a new crease on my spine where I hit the wall.

Her door slammed again and I was shocked to see her head come into view second later.

"So you can...talk? Well, write?"

Without the terror-fueled screaming, imprinting words on the page proved difficult. I tried to push individual words onto the page but only managed to wriggle my cover a little.

"Sorry!" she said, opening me to the next blank page and watching as I pushed y-e-s up through it. "And sorry for throwing you. I was...surprised."

I would have nodded back if I had known how to do that or what it was supposed to look like. I only knew how she used it and it felt right but not like something I could physically do.

"Is it easier for you if I write or talk like this?" she asked and I pondered for a moment before responding.

b-o-t-h.

"Alright," she said and took a seat next to me on the bed, chatting as I pushed words back at her. We talked for hours, filling the page with questions and responses before she was too tired to continue.

Over the next few days, she explained what had happened. Henry had dumped her, whatever that meant, and it had broken her heart. She only wanted to destroy me to destroy those memories of how much he had loved him.

It still hurt and she apologized again before she shared some new secrets and dreams. College was coming, she said, and her parents had thoughts about her choice in schools. She didn't care. She wanted to take the glass blowing class and learn Swahili and be a part of a "culture of artists" as she called it.

g-r-e-a-t, I wrote back. g-o y-o-u!

"But my parents think I should go to this other school and study something reasonable," she said the last word with such disgust that I assumed it meant something like dog vomit. "Like accounting or some crap." she huffed.

D-o y-o-u. I pushed.

She smiled. "You know, you're a great listener, Book."

I pushed a heart onto the page. She held me in her arms. We were as tight as we had ever been and in the weeks that followed, my pages were filled with responses to more boy drama (Henry was dating some skank) and excitement over college options, stress over preparing for midterms, and sadness over her grandmother falling ill.

"It's getting closer now." She said one night, tears streaming down her face.

A-r-e y-o-u O-K?

"I will be." she said as a tear fell onto me, warm and wet.

She had not been wrong. Her grandmother was gone less than a week later, and there was a lot of crying. This was the grandmother who told her that her art mattered, the one that always believed in her.

The biggest shock came a week later, just as we moved onto the back of my last blank page. Grandma had a will, which had to be read to the family by a lawyer. Somehow this meant that $20,000 of her grandma's money would be hers, but only under the condition that she use it to go to that art school after all.

Tears of joy and sorrow left their mixed impressions on my page as we talked through what came next. Grandma had the last word after all. With her parents unwilling to fight against the last wishes of the dead, when the fall came, so did art school.

Only as she settled into her dorm room did she register how little space was left in me. Even the margins of every page were filled with my responses, the stuttered labors littering every inch. I wanted to tell her it was okay, that I was happy to have helped, that our time together had been precious to me, but as her tears and apologies fell, I only had space for two words.

D-o-n-'-t W-o-r-r-y.