Dogeared

She sat on the floor, wiping her brow. It had been a long day of organizing the things in her room, and she wasn’t even half done. She whistled over the junk she had accumulated in her lifetime.

She turned to one side, where a couple of boxes 20 inch high were stacked on each other. “Might as well get through them now,” she mumbled, getting up.

She took the one labeled “Books” and gently laid it down on the floor. Opening it, she saw the books she haphazardly placed into the box many years ago, when she decided to move out of her parents’ house. She laughed at the thought that she had never been able to touch them since packing them that hot summer day many years ago.

She took out a few books, pleasantly surprised to see a few of her favorites in there. She picked one up and rifled through its pages until she opened the page with a special bookmark.

Oh yes, she used to have the habit of dogearing her books. Shaking her head at her previous carelessness, she smoothed out the little flap as she searched the page for the reason she marked it out in the first place. Finding it, she looked up wistfully and smiled, then closed the book and set it aside.

She then picked up book after book, smoothing the dogeared pages after reading the page she marked before. The passages were funny sometimes, beautiful in others. There were also some wherein she had no idea of why the dogeared page was so special. Funny how one line in a book could mean so much today and be totally commonplace tomorrow.

She went through all of the books, until she got to the last one. It was Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. “How odd,” she thought, as the dogeared page was the very last one. She opened the book to the last page, where a line was encircled in red pen.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…”

She gasped in recollection of a young man telling her the exact same thing right before she left that old house, that provincial city. She smoothed the bookmark, and saw the words “I love you” written neatly in the little flap. It was in a handwriting she knew so well, that of a boy from the province who used to send her love notes, buy her flowers, and help her pack her things.

Tears fell from her eyes as she slowly sat back down on the floor, caught in the undertow of nostalgia and a lost love.

–
First written December 8, 2017.
#68