No more books

For years I bought books in heaps, carried them home with my pulse pounding with the urge to read, stacked them on the floor or my desktop with heart evening but still excited, shelved them with interest but no thrill, then left them unread. Of course I read some of them, just never as many as I bought. I bought aspirationally. I bought books on things I wanted to know about, but even more I bought books for selves I wanted to be. I wanted to be the sort of person who knew about Ukranian peasant uprisings and about sight singing. Really, I wanted to be the sort of person who wanted to know those things. After while my desk, floor, and shelves got cluttered, my aspirations got dusty, started to smell like mildew. I got tired of stubbing my toe on the pointed corner of a hardcover edition of someone I never managed to turn into or having my foot go out from under me as I slid after stepping on a paperback copy of a person I didn’t have the energy to pretend I would enjoy becoming. The collapsed stacks of books and doublestacked shelves became a bug collection, dead selves pinned in jars. It became a collection of trophies I never managed to get. I started making jokes about having a bonfire, and about how the best part of living under a totalitarian regime would be the limits it placed on publishing. I sold just over half the books, bid good riddance to the philosopher I wasn’t, the translator I had almost been, the rock climber I had briefly been, the chef I might have become if I hadn’t had kids, the policy-analyst I never really believed I could be. The guy at the secondhand store praised the collection and shook my hand. I thanked him, walking a line between politeness and deception as I played along with his assumption that I’d read them all, and accidentally shoplifted a book on writing. I read from it in the car while he tallied my cut of the worth of all that biblioflotsam. “Keep your hand moving,” the author wrote. I drummed on my knees. The bookstore guy called my cellphone, “this is gonna take a while, I’ll call you in the morning.” I drove home, dropped the writing book under my desk in a stack of unread writing books.