Burning Books

I go farther.

From home,

From what I know,

But so I meet more of myself

And I like what I find.

I wrote this almost four months ago, not truly knowing what it meant, but maybe I am starting to understand. I watch me living this life, and sometimes I laugh at myself, and sometimes I frown. I’ve been trying to listen to my thoughts and take time to understand them. Maybe this is a prolonged adolescence, or maybe I am only now starting to grow up, but I’m finally learning how to be happy with myself and by myself. I love the people I have in my life, and I know I want them there. But I am also incredibly thankful for this juncture that I am at right now. I am thankful for the people who have let me go or pushed me away, because without this space, it would have taken a lot longer to get here.

In the past, I’ve been able to look back at my younger self and appreciate the distance and the difference, but today, I’m conscious of the change as it is happening. As light and peaceful as I feel these days, there are also moments of profound sadness. I am distressed by the understanding that I am different today than I was a year ago, six months ago, or even a week ago. And the knowledge of the many, many changes to come. But we never really leave behind any experience, any mistake, or any part of ourselves, try as we might with some. I am waving goodbye to the latest form of myself, but with the knowledge that she, with all the others, will follow soon and stay with me until I die.

People are noise. Melodious, and maybe necessary noise, but at the end of the day, friends, lovers, and family are all muffling the conversation between you and yourself. We define ourselves by our relationships: today I am a daughter to my parents, a sister to my cousins, a friend to my friends, and maybe one day, I will be a wife to a husband or a mother to my children. But to be only these things, and to expect only these things from others is to reject the ever-evolving self.

I have always surrounded myself with people, music, books, television, perhaps because I feared loneliness, or feared facing myself. I look back at the way I have behaved with people at times, and I feel wretched about it. I regret the selfish things I have said or done, just because someone did not meet my needs or expectations.

There is a chapter of Don Quixote, where the knight-errant returns home to La Mancha after his first round of adventures. His family and friends, recognizing his madness, conclude that he is getting his crazy ideas of knighthood and chivalry from the books and novels that he reads. While Don Quixote sleeps off his fatigue, two men spend the day in his personal library, sorting through his vast collection and tossing his precious books out the window to be destroyed. They keep a few treasures for themselves, burn the rest, and then board up the room, painting over the door to make it seem like it never existed.

“He came to the place where the door used to be, and tried it with his hands, and turned and twisted his eyes in every direction without saying a word; but after a good while he asked his housekeeper whereabouts was the room that held his books.” No one gives him a proper answer and instead they feed him some story about a magician having vanished the library.

This scene broke my heart. What gives someone the right to burn a person’s books and board up his library, and keep him or her from following the path they feel is right? I am probably getting confusing at this point, but let me end with this. If I have ever kept you from your library, burned any of your books, or told you not to be a knight when you wanted to, I am so sorry. Maybe I will not always understand why you do what you do, or want what you want, but I will try to remember that what I see is only an illusion of your complex, private reality.

I won’t cheapen these thoughts and this farewell to penultimate me by saying that Spain is the reason behind them. But it is one hell of a poetic backdrop.