“One of these days, I will set your books on fire,” my mother told a depressive 2003 version of me.
It was almost a week since I had my presence felt around the house. The truth is, the books did not keep me preoccupied because as far as I remember, it was my intention to become invisible at home. It so happened that I had books in my room and my mother caught me several times in bed with Franny and Zooey. I didn’t panic because the least that a depressed person usually feels is concern for anything.
Frankly though, books, next to music, saved me.
I was sent away to live with strangers when I was in high school. I stayed in a boarding house, sharing a very small room with two more students. Sometimes it was with a college student, other times with a high school. In those times we didn’t do much except study, netbooks and ipods were a thing of a future and the biggest mall in the city was just a large version of a grocery store. One of us brought a stereo cassette player and all the boarders would share in the free music.
In our little boarding house reading became our way to spend our leisure time. There, in our little house we formed groups based on literary genres—if you can call it such. I remember the two distinct groups: the romance novel group and (for the lack of better group name) the non-romance novel group. This non-romance group read varied stuffs, from the Melville, Kafka, Agatha Christie, and the pop-horror Stephen King. Sometimes these two groups merged, particularly when the topic of Sweet Dreams comes upon. In the romance section, I only went as far as Mills and Boons, my first introduction was when I was in grade 5 (11 years old) bored with nothing to read for summer. My mother had, in our rickety rattan bookshelf, some twenty something Mills and Boons (which I’m not sure if she’d read) given to her by a friend for safekeeping. What I’m not sure though, was, if Mills and Boon was my first introduction to “dirty books”, but I stayed away from them when an older person told me it had “dirty parts”. (What that old person didn’t know was, I already knew about the dirty parts.) My board mates however, were fond of Judith McNaught. Romance novels, like exotic foods, are acquired tastes and it was a taste i never did acquire.
Looking back, it seemed that weekends in those days were very lonely, and comparing it to the lifestyle that kids now have, we’d be the geekiest lot. We spent our Saturdays holed up in our rooms, finishing a novel or two. Some of our housemates start as early as Friday night if the books were interesting enough, finishing 2-3 novels by Sunday. Book rental stores were in vogue 10-15 years ago and it was our habit to rent a handful of books for weekend reading.
I eventually developed dependence on books—and music—to keep me company, and to help me not make unnecessary small talk when I am around people I do not like to associate with.
My love for books was a double edged-sword. While I was gradually becoming better at my literary tastes and my skills in writing, my drive to focus on my academics waned. Arriving from school (already in university), I would plop myself in the most comfortable corner of my bed and read. Staying up very late reading, Having stayed up late reading, I would come to class tired, lethargic and impatient for the day to end so I could go home and melt in my bed reading. Reading (or reading for leisure) proved to be an addiction that led to my eventual failure, but it is a habit I never regretted getting. What I regretted was appreciating my textbooks too late; because when you’re a rebel and you’re hip, staying out of school and dissuading your textbooks seemed the coolest thing to do.
I found work in the city and moved out of my parent’s, leaving a good collection of second hand books, some, rare out-of-print editions. It has always been a strictly enforced rule of mine that all of my books are for “room use only”, having lost many from avid borrowers and admirers of my library. One day, our schoolgirl braved to browse through my dresser-pseudo-bookshelf and found out that most of them were just for show. The termites have eaten through 80% of my books and all that remained of them were the spines, a horrid reminder to a self-absorbed, book-hoarder me. My mother kept the news a secret, the way she kept the news about the death of my dog from me, convincing my younger sister (at that time my city roommate) to break it to me when the time is right. My mother salvaged all that’s been clean of live termites, stacking them inside the straw sacks. I told them to burn everything that isn’t readable anymore, but when I returned years after they were still there. Books with covers so pristine but once turned over, is nothing but a big hole right the middle of the back cover straight through page 1.
I stopped buying books for a while after that and never went anywhere near Booksale. I also considered blaming my parents for the lack of bookshelf in our house considering that all of their children are avid readers, but I know that is not right because if there is a thing that should be blamed, it is the termites. And maybe myself.
When i was a graduate student, pregnant, out of work with lots of time and learning from past mistakes, I read and worked hard in my academics. Thanks to ABD, I found a connection in creative writing and my field of study. Creative non-fiction and I were a perfect match and I need not give up on my line of work to be able to write imaginatively. It was then that I re-discovered my love for books, books that tell stories, stories that are real.
