My Copy

   My copy of Jazz by Toni Morrison was printed, bound, and sold in bookshops in 1992. That was thirty-one years ago at the time I am writing this, making it six years older than me. On that day, its previous owner walked into the bookshop and picked up that copy, tossing and turning it over in their hands with their wallet in their jeans or purse tucked under their arm. They would have thumbed through the early pages, skim reading them, looked at the author photo on the back, and then assessed the price. Their decision made, they would have paid for it in cash perhaps, a time before smartphones let alone contactless payments, before taking it home to read it, then putting it on their bookshelf. Maybe it sat on their bedside table, watching them sleep night after night. It might have been placed at the bottom of a drawer, the words hidden in the dark waiting to be read, with takeaway leaflets, elastic bands, and dead batteries burying it like a fossil. This was a world before the attacks on 9/11, when George H. W. Bush was keeping the seat warm behind the desk in the Oval Office.

   Thirty-one years later, it now sits on my bookshelf. Its spine bleached by the sun, the colours turning from their once rich purple, to a pastel sunset, the book having seen it set over 11,000 times since that day, in that bookstore. As I take my turn assessing the book in my own hands, a book that was tangible before I was even a thought, I wonder where that owner is now. What did that book on that shelf bear witness to. Did it see the previous owner become a grandparent, go through a divorce, lose a loved one? Was it chucked into removal boxes, living on different shelves in different houses during its journey with them. Did they grow bored of it, pass away, or lend it to someone else who eventually sold it?

   Everything we own will live its life with us, and then move on to someone else. The clothes we wear when eating dinner or laughing with our families, will be worn by someone who won’t even know our names. The books we hunch over until the early hours will be read by people who aren’t even born yet. There will be a moment, when we stare back into our lives, realising our presents having become our pasts, and it will unfurl a heavy bloom in the centre our chests. The safe golden hour lunches on a park green with the ones we love most, gone. You were all together, and now you are not. No one else will know that, as they sit in that shaded grassy spot that was once yours, and no one else will care. Time will move on, and the place in which you are sitting and thinking about this now, being occupied by someone else. My copy of Jazz by Toni Morrison, no longer mine, its pastel colours now faded to white.