DEAD POETS SOCIETY

When I was a child papa read One Thousand and One Nights to us sisters,
all in one messy heap on the big bed. Scheherazade weaved story after story into sagas

told to the sultan Shahriar, one night at a time, in one thousand and one adventures,

to prolong her own life. Another night she was allowed to live so that he'd get to hear

the end of the story. Papa read and read and read, perhaps for a thousand and

one nights, until we drifted off to sleep and until it was embedded

into my very backbone, the love of storytelling. Following that,
I read the Lord of the Rings to myself and then wrote long love letters

to Tolkien {upon which I cried for two days when mama told me he was dead and
sending those letters probably wouldn't lead to a very fruitful correspondence.}

On the weekends we'd often go to the biggest library closest to our home.

In there we'd disperse by a wind I can still sense the scent of. The scent of an
entire building filled with books. A house of thousands of worlds waiting.

Papa would disappear up to the café where he'd spread out the large format
daily papers, crowding together with cup after cup of pitch black coffee.
Mama is a mystery. Maybe she withdrew to in among
the maze-like rows of bookshelves and let herself be engulfed. 

She's still the one who always knows what book I'll love the most.

Baby sister Emma would lay on her back, her long scrawny legs
{moreover, my forever envy}, sprawling over the red velvet couch of
the glassed room where you could listen to audiobooks,

huge headphones over golden blond disarray.

I don't remember myself there at the library. I just remember the feeling.

I don't remember what I went looking for or what books

I brought home, but I think that all of this is what has made it so

that my vertebrae form as if the spine of a book. Now I need that backbone
to stand up against too much time in front of various screens in my new role as a mother.
I balance between iPad admonishments and that amazement of books that
I want to pass down, on what feels like quite a shaky tightrope at times.

One November evening Cassius and I are home alone. We lay in the big bed among

books and magazines, with stacks of warm teacups and soft satsumas at our side.
His books are mostly still bulky and the pages so thick you'd think they've
been glued together by sticky juice from said satsumas.
Far in between the sentences and close to laughter.
My books have that delicate paper where you almost get a reversed prevue
of the page to follow and still have to go back and reread to keep up
{or maybe that's just me}. He drifts off to sleep, and I roll up my cardigan sleeve,
inch myself closer so that our skin meet. A fox cries somewhere among the courtyards,

and it is perhaps the most sorrowful sound there is.

A lost cub, they say,  - that's the mother howling.

I stroke Cassius's forehead in the amber glow of the streetlight
and think of a quote I've saved on a screen of my own.

Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate.

So. How I'll read to you, buba. For maybe a thousand and one nights.

And we're gonna drop your love letters into that red, tall letterbox on the corner too.

I'll lift you up until you can reach the dark gap by yourself. Letters to the

Easter bunny like last time, or love letters to authors, the dead ones too.

Mama is strong like that, she's got sagas for a spine.

☽


art | the framed photograph is madame fragonard no 1 by anna malmberg 

bedding | midnatt home