The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.

“Books are feelings,” he replied simply. “They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what’s inside, sometimes to things we don’t even know are there. It only makes sense that some of what we feel when we’re reading would . . . rub off.”

Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.

In this life, there are losses that can never be anticipated. Grief that comes at you out of the darkness. Blows that land so swiftly and deftly that there’s simply no way to prepare for them. But sometimes you do see the blow coming. You see it and you stand there and let it knock you down. And later—years later—you’re still asking yourself how you could have been such a fool. You were that kind of blow. Because I saw you coming that very first night. And I let you knock me down anyway.

He said all truly good writing—fiction or nonfiction—has a heartbeat, a life force that comes from the writer, like an invisible cord connecting them to the reader. Without it, the work is dead on arrival.

I study your face as I sink my teeth into one of the apples from the basket, wondering about the sadness that’s suddenly crept into your tone. I want to know who put it there and why, and how I can make it go away. It’s not the first time I’ve sensed it, the melancholy air that settles around you when you think no one’s looking. The way your gaze drifts from mine when I ask certain questions.

You’ve gone sulky now, hoping to mask the fragility you’re always trying so valiantly to hide, but I see it. I’ve always seen it. Your inexplicable and incandescent sadness. No, I realize suddenly, startlingly. Not sadness. Resignation. For things left unfinished, unattempted, unrequited. For what could have been but won’t ever be, because you’ve chosen something else. Something less. Something safe.

When it came to love, there was always an imbalance, wasn’t there? Regardless of the relationship—parents, children, siblings, lovers—one party was always more invested than the other, more willing to hand over their power, to make themselves small, as the price for being loved. She’d always been the more willing one. With her parents and her husband.

We’ve been inching toward this brink for so long, always careful to pull back at the last second, to preserve some pretense of decency, but there will be no half measures today, no stopping at the water’s edge. Decency be damned.

Environment must always be considered. Books, like people, absorb what they’re around.