I am keeping the box. And I am buying a red wine later. Just to make a new stain for the next girl.
The Stain That Stayed Date: Sometime in the rain season Status: Draft
There is a particular kind of loneliness that only exists in a rented room at 2 AM. It is not the sad kind. It is the hollow, waiting kind. The kind where the walls breathe and the ceiling fan ticks like a countdown to nothing. ratu buku blogspot
I closed the book. The rain outside my window decided to become a storm. The hollow, waiting loneliness in my room? It evaporated.
Goodnight, pembaca. Go find the ugly book. I am keeping the box
I pulled out a book with no jacket. The cover was a sickly beige, the spine cracked like old skin. It was a romance novel from 1992. The kind with a shirtless man holding a woman whose dress was defying gravity. I don’t read romance. I am a Ratu of literary fiction and sad poetry.
Last night, I found myself in that space again. My TBR pile had shrunk to three sad, unread paperbacks (a betrayal to my title as Ratu Buku, I know). I had finished the last good one—a dog-eared copy of a 1987 Murakami—two hours prior. I was restless. The Stain That Stayed Date: Sometime in the
By page 47, the duke had just confessed that he couldn’t read. Not a word. He had been faking it his whole life, memorizing menus and street signs like a secret code. The baker (wheat-hair) caught him staring at a letter from his dead mother.
She taught him the alphabet. Right there, in a flour-dusted kitchen.
And yet.
Under my bed, layered in dust and broken dreams of a tidy life, is a cardboard box labeled "Donation." It has sat there for three years. Inside are the books I claimed to hate. The ex-boyfriend’s philosophy tomes. The cookbooks for diets I never started. The novel everyone loved but made me yawn.