Open Book
by Astara Raven
“You’re an open book,” they said.
I smile with the knowing that I am an open library.
You might only see one book, but I hold hundreds inside of me.
Thousands.
More.
As do you.
We are all libraries walking down the bright sidewalk, as the sun beams new data.
What happens as such stellar wisdom soaks in to my skin, my eyes, my cells? This electric storm of thought, this ocean of magnetism walking around on two feet.
This is my library.
The luminous moon pulls on my tides, flowing life codes through my blood, my lymph, my fascia — a sea of crystals storing new equations.
An open book policy, if you will.
Since I was little I drew stories to life. Crayon pictures and words and red yarn punched through holes to hold pages together. Later, I wrote in notebooks, hardbound and thick, chronicling ideas that stick, spinning thoughts, noticing which words want to be poems instead.
Every person I meet, every school agreement, my childhood family dinners, messy blind dates with life beneath vivid skies.
All of it fills my pages.
I’m my own librarian, author, illustrator, editor, publisher, and reader. Some books are checked out, with no return date. That’s the whole point: to live so big I spill out of my library into yours.
I wonder to myself, “perhaps they will find something useful in my stories.”
Then I laugh and remember, “they” are me.
There are tables stacked with piles of paper — the books I’ve yet to write. Words ahead of their time, stretching and pulling on my myth of normal.
Each book I share is like undressing in public, tossing me off the cliff edge of intimacy, between me and the world.
Then I laugh and remember, “the world” is me.
Tears and laughter are the language of the heart. That’s how I know where I reside as creative choice tattoos itself on each page. Eyes and cheeks wet, as laughter still echoes through the library halls.
My library has been under construction for decades now. Lifetimes, actually. I’m still scaffolding a new structure that can hold it all.
The fear. The delight.
The pain. The pleasure.
The desire. The surrender.
The tragedy. The comedy.
The rupture. The repair.
The known. The unknown.
All of it.
No matter what befalls each little life of mine, my library is here to expand me. The more time I spend among my own shelves the more I realize there is no opposite to love.
Walt Whitman smiles in agreement and calls across time, “You are large, you contain multitudes.”
Nodding, smiling, I quote him back, “I and this mystery here we stand.”
When you visit your own library, you stop being the accidental tourist of your life. Step inside and you’ll see the sign that’s on every library door. It reads, “Power surrendered, leads to more power.”
Hang out a moment. Feel truth’s gentle presence in amongst your shelves, whispering,
“Don’t give up.
If you miss me,
search again,
I am you,
remembered.”
