Finding Melody

08: Closer Pt.2

The hail kept powdering down the street, as we heard the bouts of laughter from downstairs, yet the silence between us was unforeseeable.

"You read?", he asked tapping the books that lined my bedside table, towering high. A certain stack of books, were in this stack one that he couldn't see, that I didn't want him to see. He flips through the books as I race over, hoping he would get the memo and stop, but he passed by the books noticing them all, his face turned sour.

"These are my father's books", he staid squeamish at that fact, and I didn't know how to say the rest. His father was any interesting person, and his books were a work of art. His words flowed so intricately and passion-filled. That I couldn't help but admire, and read the rest of the books.

"I saw them, at the cabin", I stumbled on the words as he looked through them, at my simple annotations. A book that good, and that I had so many thoughts about needed to be written down, so the margins were filled with black pen and little stickers.

"Did you do this for fun?", he asked, looking through the margins at the words I had written down in anger, frustration, sadness, fear and laughter. I somehow didn't feel threatened as he looked at something I had related to, and written my own personal thoughts and stories in the margins relating to the character soul-searching.

I had written in the margins about Daniel, the pain he had caused me, the pain that I had never met my mother, and the misery I had faced thinking that nobody had wanted me, and the overwhelming feeling of a new rich life. I somehow didn't feel embarrassed or afraid of his thoughts as he read the margins.

I twiddled with my fingers and crossed my feet, shyly. That was the only expression I could produce.

"I feel- I just- I have so many thoughts reading, and I write them down, so when I re-read the book, I'll have those thoughts", I pointed out at the book as he skimmed the margins, just passing through until he saw something that scared him, but he looked up at me. With something I had seen before, the look of pity.

But his eyes cowered, and he went back down to the pages, the notes left in the margins.

His eyes skimmed over that same page again as he set that book down in the stack. He wandered over to the large bookcase I kept in the room, and he pulled out a couple. 

"You've annotated every one of these", he asked, and I nodded my head not embarrassed of it. He looked up at me in disbelief and back to the margins.

"How do you have time for this?", he asked looking back down at the pages, feeling the pressed in words that floated in the margins. I couldn't tell if he wanted to know the answer to this question, or he was just amazed by the time and effort I had put into each book. But he knew the truth of why I had so much time, he had said it himself that day at the cabin, I had no friends.

Turns out everyone knew the answer to that question, I mean who was I kidding. My best friends were my sister and her husband, that was how pathetic I was.

"I just have soccer, then I come home and read", I told him, rocking my feet back and forth against the floorboards. He nodded his head as he looked through the books, flipping through them and just reading my notes. He seemed to enjoy it even laugh a bit as he shot me a humorous glare, and I just stood across from him, as if he was looking into my soul, and he was those pages, those little notes were my soul.