The Gone Away World is strangely not Gone Away. It is
sitting in my book shelf, boiling, seething. It is waiting, somewhat
impatiently, for my caress. It bears the marks of our relationship. I have
broken its spine, discoloured its pages with my progress, and it crinkles
alarmingly when I open it, a sweet and soured smell of some sort of citrus and
my old perfume wafting from the pages.
The Old Kingdom is similarly non-complacent. It rubs backs
with The Gone Away World. Its pages
are fresher, even though it is older, but the corners turn from being dragged
to Grahamstown and back these three years. Mattie and the North Woods are safely at home.
A Gathering Light might not have
survived another trip. These are my books, and they bear the marks of my
reading experience.
I’m sure they whisper among themselves and accuse me of
neglect. The problem is, I am held captive in other worlds. Since I started my
three year English course, I have been rushing through the landscaped pages,
from Ancient Greece and Jerusalem to a City of Glass I desperately wanted to
shatter. From the moors of northern England to the sticky heat of Ayemenem,
where the God of Small Things tortured me for my attachment. Borges mocked me.
Marquez wrenched every emotion possible from my baffled mind. This year I was
thrown onto Crusoe’s island – enthusiastic at first, but the devil truly is in
the detail – and plunged into Dickens’ seedy London, in which I revelled.
These books, these writers, have characterised my life since
the moment I delved into The Goblet of
Fire at the age of ten. Before this I read every now and then. The
stock-books for a young girl were always available – Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley
Kids – but before fiction enraptured me, I was more interested in the
non-fiction books about the supernatural. My sister and I would fight for
momentary possession of The Haunted Realm
– a book of black and white photographs that electrifies my imagination to this
day.
I do not know whether my public library back in Pretoria
still has this tome. I have not been there in years. Once fiction gripped me, I
started buying my books. I would spend
hours searching for a series that had it all – fantasy, adventure, action,
drama, romance, horror. I revelled in the blood and guts, the triumph, the
danger, the parries and blocks and broken bones – the broken hearts – I wanted
the twist of the knife, the unlikely survival and the hero’s kiss.
To this day I am of strange turn of thought. I blame the
books that whisper and call for my attention. There are worlds still to satisfy
my every craving, slake my every lust. I will search them out and, one day,
they will line my bookshelf.
Their spines will be broken, their pages thumbed in angst,
indulgence and pain. Their covers will hold me and hide me, and they will
whisper among themselves as I traverse their worlds.
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