Ochsner.
It was a ghostly book he gave me, and it haunted me even after the smell of his hair had left my pillow and the letter he sent asking for his book back had been thoroughly obliterated by new mail. I hope he understood, even when writing that letter, that I wouldn’t reply—this cursed relationship we had conformed to its own sort of justice, and the realization of our betrayal afterward was its price.
We lived for a while in a bubble, ignoring the fact that only weeks before his seemingly perfect relationship with my best friend had crumbled, as had my friendship with her. We idled in restaurants and gently poked fun at her more eccentric qualities in a ritual both awkward and cleansing. He taught me to tango the night I snuck him into my room; I skipped orchestra to go to his house, to lie in his bed and pick through his cigar box of memories of her. This book was among a few he gave to me, and I devoured it overnight, but the book itself was peripheral to the image I wanted to have of him; in each story I read I hungered for an affirmation of ‘us’.
From the start we were doomed completely to be haunted by this absent girl, and we were equally captivated by the ethereal illicitness of what might have been and the bruising, inexorable weight of the truth—that anything we could have would be unavoidably tainted by the heartache that had happened to bring us together. This book still sits on my bookshelf, and I am unable to bring myself to put it in storage. It lurks in the corner as did the memory of Sometimes, late at night, I slide it from its spot on my bookcase and look at the cover for a few minutes. One day, I will choose either to read the book and remember, or to give it away and attempt to forget him.
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mymnemosyne reblogged this from thebookstheygaveme and added:
I submitted this anonymously to a tumblr called The Books They Gave Me a while back.
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