Books are alive. They breathe life into characters, plots, and alternate realities. When you read a book, the book reads you too. It remembers you, even after you’ve forgotten it. Just as you recognize the sweet smell of its pages, its texture, the fonts, the spine, and the cover, the book remembers your eyes, their color, how they followed its lines. It looks into your soul through the pupils that stayed glued to its pages for hours and days. It senses your breath and sigh, your energy, the touch of your palm, and the emotions you poured into its pages. It remembers your every facial muscle movement that morphed your face into a smile, a rire, a frown, or a mask. It remembers your moments of confusion and moments of realization. Your moments of depression and moments of dopamine hits.
Books are dynamic. They never tell the same story twice. Each time you revisit one, it reads you back and it shares a unique version of itself, spotlighting the words, phrases, and passages you need most in that moment. A single book holds countless messages for you, waiting to unfold over multiple readings.
Sometimes it will tell you that dreams come true. On another reading, it might whisper that coincidences don’t exist. Later, it might remind you that everything happens for a reason and that every encounter, every goodbye, every passer by is meant to be. On yet another occasion, it could assure you that second chances are magical and ask you never to miss them. And still, in a quiet moment, it may gently reveal that not all wishes come true.
That’s why, when we open a random page, we often stumble upon the answer to the question weighing on our hearts.
Sometimes books are like mirrors where you find yourself reading your life story. And the book will remember how you temporarily closed to book to see who has written it, doubting that the author knows you at a deeper level.
Once you’ve read a book, you’ve made a friend, a counselor, a psychologist, a teacher, and a magician all at your disposal.
In a lifetime, we can only make so many friends. Like people, some books challenge us. They disagree, argue, remain stubborn, and refuse to meet us halfway. But unlike people, books never truly abandon us. They are always there, waiting, remembering us, holding space, until we forget and abandon them.
That is why I prefer befriending secondhand books over brand new ones that give you euphoria and paper cuts. I love the old tired, exhausted, lonely books. Ones without their dust jackets and loosened spines. They have lived long enough and seen enough of the humankind. I wonder who held this book before me, who first read its prologue, who made friends with it, and who couldn’t agree with it. I look for small hidden notes among its pages, a dried grass flower or a receipt for a bookmark, coffee stains, fading highlights, annotations, signatures, names, dates, and the intangible and invisible energy that radiates from it. Also the absence of such small marvels among the pages has a meaning.
These little treasures hold a second story within the book. Referring to people. Referring to the fantasies of the reality.
That is why when the I see the words “a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers”, I say, “No, the definition should be a friend made of paper, waiting to meet you to share its wonder”.