Bibliophobia

by Sarah Chihaya

It wasn’t a surprise that I ended up in the hospital. The main surprise was how long it took me to get there. I’d been wondering about it for years, even fantasizing about it occasionally. It was just another little joke I had with myself. My breakdown would be both clearly inevitable (so nobody felt bad because it would obviously only be my fault) and gradual (so nobody would suspect there was a moment when they could have stopped it), but also would contain a sudden event (so everyone would know when it had definitively happened, which would be, no doubt, a relief for us all). It would have to happen while I had good health insurance, so nobody would be put out financially. My breakdown would be perfect and considerate.

Probably not, because you’re just crying, for God’s sake, and you cry all the time what with all the current apocalypses, especially if you’re not doing so well at work, or you spent too much time reading comments online, or people are moving on with their lives around you, or families are making their normal, irremediable family trouble.

“It’s like you’re a depressed 1950s housewife who tells her husband that she’s running errands but just goes out and rides the subway all day”?

It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s fine.

Breakdown was what happened when their gorgeous shells became so brittle and delicate they could be shattered with the slightest tap of the back of a spoon—tenderly set and ready to ooze out of their gelid whites with a hot, vividly compelling, golden violence.

This, like many of my anxieties, is both literal and literary. While the fear of death-by-shelf is a very real,

This happens a lot, that feeling when I can’t remember if I thought a thought or if a book planted it in my brain, and it’s just now popped up from wherever it was hiding. Part of my fate as a greedy, acquisitive reader is that I can never escape the overbearing presence of books, whether in the mind or on the shelf. I wonder if, without them, I’d have any thoughts at all. Or if I would be anyone at all.

They were like talismans that, having taken something from me, might offer some protection in return.

All my crises are scrawled in the margins of the novels I’ve read over and over again, sometimes to feel safe, sometimes to sink willfully into further despair.

I was afraid I wouldn’t pass the test.

I can’t pinpoint almost any of what happened then in single events, both because I could never directly look at them in the first place, and because I can’t see them directly in retrospect now. I can only tell you how the tissue of time around and between them felt.