Tome

tome \tohm\, noun: a large, often scholarly, book

Sitting alone with your books, at first all I can do is look at them. Stacks upon stacks upon stacks in the corners and lining the shelves and forming felled heaps on the floor, but organized into some sort of categorized set, I know. Mostly leather-bound, these are heavy books, their pages lined with gold feather. The room smells like one big book, and I am in it. I understand now how you could spend hours in here. Time stops. Words are seconds. Pages are minutes. A book in here is only a day - at least it was for you. For me a book would be a month, two months. I never had your dedication for it. I lived outside this room. This room of thick outsides and crispy insides. This room of texture and weight. One feels solid within its walls. Kept. Held. Important. I can feel you in this room. I touch these books, knowing you have also touched them, and I flip them open and flick the pages through my fingers and I pause at what you've written in the margins. I could spend the rest of my life finding and contemplating all the rows of text that you have spent yours underlining. I will run my hands over everything, stick my nose in the bindings, and steady each spine in my palms. I will find you here and I will settle in it, wanting nowhere else to go.