Written in the Book
Secret, sapphic community found in annotated pages
The closet is a unique and universal trauma.
It is because of that simple and heartbreaking truth that we can find community in the most unique, quiet spaces, like a library book, published in 1992.
At first, I thought the book must have been donated by someone because it had been annotated. The penciled lines marked page one, underlining and parenthesizing, and I knew that this book about hidden, sapphic love and adulterous affairs must have meant something to someone.
Pencil marks, faded but still stark against the yellowed page, giving their weight of hidden grief with every daring stroke. Each sentence, a private admission of wanting and not knowing, of understanding but not speaking.
I looked closer and noticed that some marks were more faded than others, and that the parenthesis around one paragraph emphasized the faded underlined sentences as if to coax them back to life, without daring to overwrite them.
On the following page, those pencil marks with varied weight were met with blue ink. Underlines of yearning, and hopeful lying, and keeping love hidden and sacred and safe alongside the sin of adultery and the fear of being found.
Each mark, an admittance of knowing and wanting what too many of us crave and live without. The three types of lines danced in conversation, though the one before the next would know nothing about it, but the last to leave her mark would hold close to her chest.
The lines were drawn, but no words were written in the margins, because then their most carefully kept secrets might be found, unable to be taken back, unable to be kept neatly stacked along the shelves of their closets as this book returns to the shelves of the library.
No words, at least, at first. The courage grew over time and as the story stretched on and the lines started taking over entire pages.
Blue said, on page 86: Write on body.
Pencil, on 118: 3 sad people quiet in a shaking house.
The marks are left waiting for the next. No one checks, and no one dares erase the confessions.
They wait with unknown stretches of time between one reader and the next, another person entering the conversation as witness, or perhaps, to leave their own traces of self on the pages.
I wonder if, years later, the first owner of the book had happened to look and see the old friend marked by others, so see and know that even in the loneliest of spaces, they had never truly been alone.
The book itself, a reminder, that none of us are alone.
In hope,
Mx. Dani