Not Enough Toni Morrison
Skriiiiitch goes the packing tape, as I maneuver my hands and an elbow to simultaneously hold down the flap of the packing box and tape it shut. It’s the third box I’ve taped shut today, and there will be three more. I sneeze. The dust from books I don’t know if I’ve ever opened has lodged itself in my sinuses. I sneeze again.
As I take the Sharpie to the cardboard to label the box’s content, I find myself wistful for a life I long stopped living. This Pepto-Bismol bedroom is where I played Polly Pockets because Mom wouldn’t buy me Barbies. It’s where I wrote ranting journal entries about how angry I was at my parents when they sent me to my room for what I perceived as a minor infraction. It was in this daybed - now covered with my sibling’s pajamas and my packing detritus - where I heard that Osama bin Laden had been killed over the radio on the iHome I got for my bat mitzvah. Here I stayed up way past my bedtime with my best friend every summer, and here I had my first sleepovers with my Savta.
And now here I am. I haven’t lived in this room for years. My family doesn’t even call it “Naima’s room” anymore, and I’m not sure if that started before I got engaged or if it’s when I started noticing. I start to make a rhythm of folding and taping and placing and taping and labeling; I find myself opening each sefer to look at how I labelled it mine. I flip through select books in the set of Kehati mishnayot that sat short and proud on the tallest shelf to see if my middle and high school selves annotated the masechtot they learned. I hold the boxes of Gemara flashcards tenderly, trace the stickers I used to adorn them.
I finish with most of the sefarim, and I call for my fiancé to join me upstairs. He comes into the room with a Microsoft Word doc open on his laptop; it’s a draft of his senior sermon for rabbinical school. I ask him which of my regular books he has copies of, so we can avoid duplicates. He traces his pointer finger over well-worn paperbacks and tells me that he doesn’t have his own copies of certain Tennessee Williams plays or that he lost a Kazuo Ishiguro novel.
And I tell him in turn that the second-hand Anne of Green Gables books are coming with me, and the Little House on the Prairie books. “I’d forgotten I had all the Anne books,” I tell him. I don’t need to explain to him why this is fraught, but I do anyway, after I read through his sermon draft. There’s something striking to me now about pausing from packing up my bat mitzvah presents to edit a dvar Torah for the man I’m going to spend my life with. But in the moment it was perfectly natural.
“This is the good kind of sad,” I tell him, because he knows how to read my face. He nods, reassures me that it’s still hard. Books are a love language we didn’t have to teach each other how to speak: when we first matched on Hinge, I’d told him my bookshelf had “too much John Green and not enough Toni Morrison.” If I’d known that a year after sending that message, I’d be preparing to merge bookshelves, I might have written something else. I might’ve tried to be more impressive.
And the thing is, it really is the happy kind of sad. We don’t know where we’re going to live yet, where his future pulpit will bring us, but I do know that we’ll need a lot of empty walls for the dozens and hundreds of books between us. His Koren daf yomi set, a graduation gift from his parents, will go hand-in-hand with my pink-covered Da’at Mikra Tanach set and the aforementioned Kehati, both of them awarded to me as an awkward twelve-year-old. His Shakespeare will sit next to mine, Folgers and Arden and complete works alike. He has more academically Jewish books, I have more random sefarim. Together we have a pretty thorough library.
We each head downstairs, passing generations of family photos on the way. My siblings are occupied at various screens, Facetiming a partner and watching the game. Abba’s on his way to a gig, Mom’s grading quizzes at her desk in the den. The sky is dusky, and I’m typing away at a blog post. Even though everything has changed the way it should, it’s also stayed the same. The way it should.