I week ago, with money not enough to last for the week, I found a second hand bookstore and couldn't resist adopting a few books. Just two actually, drawing the line on an Adrian Mole book, it was big but so was the price and I had to consider whether or not I wanted to walk all the way to the office for the rest of the work week. But I got Joan Didion's White Album and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy. Happy and giddy and 70 pesos poorer, I went back to the dorm for at least four nights quiet and curled up in my lower bunk bed.
Today I'm wearing a little black bubble dress bought from a second hand clothes shop. I paired it with black stockings and my old and worn at the edges white wedge shoes.
I'm an expert mover. I've lived in dorms, boarding houses, friend's houses, boyfriends' apartments, parents' houses, rented rooms, studio-types. All with traces and sometimes scars of its previous occupant. Whispers of stories reverberating and untold within its walls.
I've written nothing much and yet I claim to be a writer. But I can tell you borrowed stories, stories that other people and other beings in my dreams have lent me. I do not know if I wish to create, perhaps it's such a chore if not at all becoming less possible as centuries grow old and tales tell themselves over and over, spilling from people's minds, coated with thin newness.
I look years beyond my real age. Old, yes, but I strive to be as fascinating as my second hands. A lived life, a story told, pre-loved, pre-owned.
