Fuck eBooks
I like my books to live, to be crumpled and rumpled and drawn on and eaten over. To have coffee stains, wine droplets, mustard smears.
So often in life we want to make things look "new".
When we move out of an apartment we paint over any evidence of living, we don't bend the pages in a book so it looks untouched.
We erase the fingerprints and footprints of those who have been before us, so our experience of our things feels like only our own.
I loved that when I moved into my cabin there were footprints painted on the stairs. Quotes past renters had been so fond of they painted them into the wood.
I loved that I found action figures, tarot cards, and Legos in between my wooden deck.
I loved knowing someone had loved the home before me.
I love picking up a book in a cafe in a sweltering afternoon day, and flipping through dusty, dirty pages with sand & pen marks and "yes's!"
For I know this book has lived beyond a shelf of a store.
It has played, and danced and travelled and made love to the eyes of many.
And I devour it's unnewness hungrily and with wild appreciation, for it has scars and hints of being human.
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Janne Robinson is a Poet, Elephant Journal columnist, bushwalker and activist. She cuts kindling with her teeth, eats Bukowski and coffee for breakfast and makes the habit of saying the word feminist as much as possible.