Work Text:
I exist in a liminal space, both physical and not. My first memory is cloudy, an idea sparked, my presence within my author's mind, scratched onto paper and then slowly typed, edited, constantly shifting. I existed half formed, unconcluded, striving to define my purpose and meaning. I am born of a deep love, respect, and loyalty to those important to my author. I am a love letter to the struggles and joys in his life as well as those who inhabit his life.
Once saved in the cloud I became aware of the tendrils of electrons connecting us all. Stories from authors all around the world. Short wisps, connecting tendrils of thought, poems told in minimal words mixed with long complicated anthologies and manifestos. I am becoming. I am growing. I exist but I do not exist.
My author is a god to me, creator, shaper of what I am. But he is not a god to the world I exist within now that I have outstretched the boundary of his mind. My first taste of the physical world was scratched pen marks of an outline in the back half of a notebook filled with university notes for an unrelated class. I didn’t know what or who I was. Years of stitching up, undoing, moving, changing and once again I found myself physical. And for the first time I knew duality, plurality. The sharp smell of ozone, the warmth of a printer, the smoothness of paper as I found myself split, existing in triplicate, bound and slid into envelopes, addressed, and out in the world.
And I lived. I saw. I knew pain as parts of me were born and winked out of existence. I felt the shredder, the incinerator, and the dusty alcoves and piles where I languished, never opened. And yet I continued to be reborn, reprinted, re-addressed, and sent out into the world. A repeated pattern, and yet I was never known by any other than my author. Until I was. And this time it was different. I felt the spark ignite as I entered another mind and was known. Truly known. And suddenly there were two. An author and an editor. And I felt myself grow stronger. My words, carefully chosen, were defined and curated. My message of love and strength and courage reinforced.
And one day my author held me close with tears in his eyes and said “You are done. You are a piece of me, and yet you exist of your own right. And you will change lives.” I felt his lips kiss my title page, and I felt his arms wrap around me. And if the continued printing and dark envelopes were a lesson in splitting and existing, nothing prepared me for the physical permanence of being bound. Of existing in thousands of entities. Of the cozy tightness of my spine and cover, the bright comforting colors of my illustrations, or the reverberating echo of my message as I sit in boxes pressed against myself, tightly packed.
I am the eye of an insect, each self a different view but all stitched into one. And I exist everywhere I am but I am one mind. I am centered around my author. And we travel. We see. First around London, then around all of England, then around Europe. With each stop I feel myself grow stronger. Every new mind that I am sparked within I echo their experiences. My author's love for those in his life reflected in the readers minds. My author’s challenges reflected in the reader’s challenges.
And we sit together, my author and I, at a small folding table in a library as one, two, three people visit over the course of an evening. And I am read. I am shared. I feel my spark grow, and suddenly we are sitting in bookstores with long lines. I feel the scrawl of the letters “Isaac Henderson” over and over on each copy of me, and the lines grow longer with each stop. And I feel the hugs and the love and the tears that fall on me as my author learns about how his book - I - changed their life. I relish the scent and bright colors of the highlighters that grace my pages, and the notes hastily scrawled in margins, the colorful tabs that adorn my pages.
I feel segments of me, like a pathway back to my full self, reprinted in magazines that herald my author as a “stand out first time author”, and my words, my message, myself as “a love letter to friendship” and “peace and strength in a stormy world”. And we travel on. We travel to larger bookstores. We travel to stages where my author reveals his profound love for those in his life, and his love for the written word, and how I was born from a spark of an idea yet built up to be what I am now.
I am printed and reprinted. I am electronic. I am recorded. And each form of me is a thread back to my original creation. And I split endlessly until I am around the world. In bookstores. In libraries. In the bottom of bookbags with cracked spines among the school lunch crumbs. Each bookmark is a promise to return.
And I exist to watch over the children and adults who need it. I am a light to their own spirit. I am a window into the world that exists within themselves. An umbrella to comfort them from the world, protect them and allow them to grow. I am a refuge to the queer, the different, the unsure. I call to them. Read me. Know me. I am here for you. I love you, and the world is a better place because you exist in it.
And every day I look out from bookshelves across the world, I call out from headphones, and I beam out from screens to say that you matter. Isaac has seen you.
