The books Jude brought me had been handled, covers worn, spines showing through the threadbare binding like a skinned knee. I liked the way they felt haunted by other hands, the feeling that time didn’t really keep us apart, wasn’t an unbreachable gap. That I could touch the same objects as the ghosts of other times. I felt their presence in the parsed-over pages, the pencil marks, obscure annotations. You like things that are old and broken, Jude often teased, and so did he. But where he wanted to fix things up, repair and repurpose them, I liked to watch them wear down, go to ruin.
