silversolitaire | On Scars, Cars and Marred Books

Yesterday I said that my car accident didn't leave any scars behind. Today I realized that this wasn't true. While cleaning up I found a copy of the screenplay of Velvet Goldmine, my most favorite movie in the whole world. This certain book was one of my most cherished ones. I had it with me when my car crashed and overturned. I thought it was lost and when I finally saw my car again, totalled and dead, I found it lying behind the driver's seat. It was stained with grass and there was dirt and sand all over it. Some strange fluid had drenched the pages with the glossy pictures and it was ripped, scratched and creased. I was devastated and tossed it in a box, determined to buy a new one.Mind you, I love all of my books and I always exercise great care when handling them. There's nothing that infuriates me more than someone bending the back of my books, staining or scratching the cover or dog-earing the pages. I've started fights over this issue. When I was fleeing from a burning hotel in Paris all I took with me was my copy of "The Art of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" (okay, that was rather by mistake actually, but I do love this book, LOL).So I took this book and brought it home. I hadn't seen it again since then. Today I found it under a pile of magazines, next to the bag that contained the last remains of my beautiful car... a shard of glass, the badge and a piece of the tree that stuck through the back window. I took the book and leafed through it. Sand and dried grass poured from it and I realized that I loved this book even more than ever. I took a pencil and jotted down some notes on the pages, no longer afraid to do that since the book was ruined anyway. And it looks wonderful.

I thought about what my grandfather used to say... He was a man who never read something without a pen in his hands. He wrote whatever he thought about it on the pages. I used to ask him how he could do that, ruin a beautiful book like that. And he said to me: "If you've got a book that is so dear to your heart that you want to make it yours completely and give something of yourself into it, how can that be wrong?" I never understood that.

Now I do. I will always love this book, although it's the ugliest, dirtiest book in the sorriest state I own. It will be mine forever and it will be the scars I was supposed to have...