I am a book. My body is a book. My life is a book. My home, my heart, my spirit … all are books. Some of these were tucked away in hidden tomes in the special reserved section or banned altogether. Each day, each moment, I open another volume, a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence, a word, the spaces between the letters and the punctuation. I’m returning to this same book of me over and over but each time, it’s different. The textures, the language, the characters, even the story itself, it’s a slippery something, evolving, endlessly entertaining. A choose your own adventure only better, unbound.
I am the book that I read over and over again.
And the novel I am writing is one that I read over and over again.
And the bound book, Beloved, by Toni Morrison is one I could read over and over again.
I hope Toni Morrison wouldn’t take offense that her work isn’t first on my list. She did, after all, say, “If there’s a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
To read me over and over again is to write me over and over again. Each day. Each hour. Each moment. Each breath. Each word.
And so I begin. Anew.
Rhena Writes 