American River Review 2019 - Flipbook - Page 20
Bibliotheca
Jennifer Snow
We are, each of us, the protagonists of our own
meandering dramas. Our lives are a mass of inkblots
stretched across the pages, like the muddied footsteps
of children leading off into the snow. Worries and
ambitions, triumphs and tragedies, are the chapters we
earmark as we pen our lives. Our story introduces friends,
family, and loved ones as the archetypal wise old men,
the mentors, the love interests, and the sidekicks with
whom we share select paragraphs, and who, on occasion,
occupy entire chapters. They are the ensemble we allow
to read our first draft as it is being written. They are
the people for whom we redirect our chirography and
line-edit the narrative. They are the companions walking
beside us, under the clear skies of late-night hikes, along
redwood-lined trails leading into thick forests. They are
those who accompany us during our wanderlust–ducking
under tired branches and treading new paths over crushed
leaves laying beside repurposed oak hollows. They are
the catalysts of nocturne journeys to remote campsites
that overlook the visual infinity of the ocean to witness
the gentle waves rising in prayer to Luna. They are the
gel in the pen, the lead of the pencil, the ink on the quill,
who outline the story within our pages.
They are, within each chapter, the highlighted
phrases—the majuscule characters dripping their own
ink into our manuscript, penning their own framed story
within our narrative. A best friend who moves away in
chapter eight after helping to edit the prior five chapters,
and who makes her triumphant return in chapter twentythree, jumping off the page like a camel cricket and
overjoyed to become a recurring character, before fading
into spaces between the words, as if a footnote to the
first quarter of your novel. A teacher who pushes you
to apply to Columbia in chapter twenty, guiding your
hands just as their own fingers trample over your draft—
retreading the ink with red strikeouts while inserting new
descriptors and more concrete nouns. A cousin in chapter
fourteen whose spark, having flickered between dim and
luminous for multiple chapters, is suddenly extinguished,
like the shuttering of a once bright, candle-lit window
at dusk, and whose presence now remains as a wisp of
smoke, trailing through each chapter that follows. Or a
father, lowered into eternal darkness at the beginning of
chapter sixteen, who becomes the oft-ignored subtext
that now marks every page with his tragic sidenote.
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American River Review
These superscripts, footnotes, and nuance add depth and
substance to their stories, and by doing so, enhance our
own.
Annotations line the margins for the few we take
note of: the cameos, the ones we remember fondly, the
ones with whom we recall late nights filled with deep
conversations, but not the content of those footnotes. The
scribbles of laughter while stargazing on a midwinter
night. The playful dance of punctuation marks bumping
into each other on park paths. The bleeding ink of
stinging tears outside your house as their car pulls away.
They are the flashes of lightning—the single word or
sentence that strikes at offending plots foreshadowing
scents of petrichor and geosmin. They are the ones
that appear throughout our epic, teaching a lesson and
fading into the background once more, possibly never
to resurface. Yet their presence remains transposed upon
the lettering like coffee stains. Their influence pushes
our pens to the parchment as we journey along unseen
roads and across covered bridges leading to new forests
for us to get lost in, just as they become lost among the
whitespace.
Punctuation holds hands with the faded cameos—
the gasps for breath and second glances, the skipped
heartbeats, the chance encounters. They are the ones in
the background, never given for us to expend energy
marking the page. They but live between the lines,
invisible yet ever-present nonetheless; unseen forces that
push one way or another, whose story you will never
read—a part of your whitespace, just as you are a part of
theirs: a woman crossing the street, brushing into you on
her way by; the dull red shimmer of tail-lights fading out
behind you on a back road; a late arrival to the subway
as the doors close; a dark shadow passing in front of a
curtained window at midnight, as you pull away from a
stop sign.
The world is a bibliotheca, an athenaeum that can never
be filled to capacity. Books completed, partially written,
penned in an unknown language, or empty and blank, line
the shelves—each an autobiography opened only when
we enter the writer’s life, yet we are never given the
opportunity to read the events which occurred prior to our
appearance—we are instead left waiting for them to drip
their ink into our own story.