my safe haven has always been the library,

nestled among shelves upon shelves of beautiful, beautiful books

old with new and new with old

a mixture of the best and the worst of society,

a history of what is important to us,

mistakes galore nestled amongst perfect prose,

a record of the world’s collective knowledge.

 

i’ve always marveled at everything about books

from the funny smell given off by old books

to the crisp innocence of new ones,

searching for meaning in the fantastical world of l’engle’s time wrinkle,

vacationing in Greece, eyes peeled, stumbling across Zeus’s conquests,

hiking in the amazon rainforest among the man-eating pirahnas,

every of one of my nine plus lives has been lived with a book in hand,

mind transported to a new realm.

 

it is no surprise, that the solution is always to read and read more,

happy? celebrate with ellen, basking in mary’s naivety,

anguished? look to ender’s impossible decisions and be glad,

lonely? well, there’s a book for that too,

it’s called a dictionary, fifth indent, right in the middle of the list,

between ignominious and irreplaceable, the word invisible, me.

 

invisible, present only between the lines, left to rot

in the place no one looks, no one gives more than a cursory glance,

forever desperately yearning to be acknowledged,

yet scarlet red at any mention of achievements, any acknowledgements,

desperately hoping to melt back into the anonymity of the unknown,

locked in a dichotomous world of wanting what i hate, and hating what i want.

 

a heart-ache so deep i can’t be sure that i wasn’t born with it

a heart-ache that permeates my mind, my soul,

crying out with hope that i almost can’t believe anymore,

hope saturated in a desire to be good enough

            to be noticed

            to be confident

            to be me,

but a voice screams it’s not always these things,

it can be partly cloudy and faint rainbows,

and half smiles and soft chuckles,

and glittering eyes and quirky jokes,

and me and me and me.

 

but mostly it’s

an eternal hope for the love of a mother,

for the understanding of somebody,

for the ability to trust anyone

with the smallest sliver of invisibility.