When We Were

by Diana Elliot Graham

The change in seasons isn’t something I’m used to. There’s a magic to fall that I never experienced outside of Thanksgiving commercials and pumpkin flavored things. I always thought it would be a slower progression. The way the word indicates it happens. Fall. Like a slow collapse from one season to another. But I guess when you’re more focused on the exciting moments of your life, it’s easy to miss even the most obvious of things, like the world changing around you. Like the trees stripping bare. Because I swear one day I woke up and stepped outside, and I stepped into October in Cambridge.

Unable to escape into sleep the way normal people do, books have been a comfort, the security blanket, therapy I refused to go to. They ask questions but don’t require answers. They make me think but expect nothing in return. And when I wake up in the middle of the night, they are companions that never complain, either keeping me company as I lay awake or lulling me back into a temporary state of rest.

Some people find pen annotations in books to be sacrilegious, others treat them as gospel. To me it feels like the most intimate way to read. Like a blood oath between reader and book. The book gives of itself so selflessly with the printed words, as the reader takes them page by page. The notes I leave written in the margins are my exchange, a way I can return to the pages that have given me so much of themselves.