The Outsiders
/It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Almost exactly a year which is wild. 2022 was an extremely rough year for me. I’m hoping 2023 will be better; I’m trying to put it into the universe that 2023 will definitely be better.
I wish I was more consistent with writing on this site but I’m still trying to find my voice and trying to decide exactly what it is I want to say. I’ve joined a 52 week writing course to help me with this. Of course, sometimes I’ll do three or four of the prompts in one day and then not do any for three weeks but it doesn’t matter because I’m writing.
In this week’s prompt, it spoke about possessions. Prized possessions from different points in my life. Then the very last part of the prompt asked for a short essay from the point of view of a special object. The first thing I thought of was my twenty-year-old copy of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I thought this was a pretty neat thing to do and it’s the first piece of writing I’ve done in a while that I wanted to share. Even if it’s only with the few people who subscribe to my site. Here it is. A (VERY) short essay from the point of you of my favorite book that I bought when I was 13.
Being picked from the bookstore is the best day of my life. Sure, it’s a short, kinda chubby, nerdy girl who grabs me and brings me home but that’s better than sitting on the shelf in the store forever. She picks me because her 8th grade English teacher said she had to, no offense taken, that’s how a lot of us books are picked. I hear from other people in the house that my new owner is named Veronica.
Veronica reads me so fast. She can’t put me down. Absorbing the plot, the characters, and enamored by the fact that the story begins and ends with the exact same sentence. She can’t believe it. She didn’t realize you could do that with writing. When she finishes with me, she puts me on a shelf then rents the movie version of me. Thus begins her obsession.
She watches the movie countless times, she reads me at least once a year, my pages getting weak and a little yellow but it’s worth it to see the look on her face. To bring her comfort on those nights when she comes home crying. Or where she stays home because she has nowhere else to go. Loneliness clings to her over the years. A sadness that always seems to ease when she picks me up or when she puts in our movie. A sadness that comes and goes in waves. This room where she keeps me is her my favorite place. The place she spends most of her time and I watch her as she brings her friend Kait over every Thursday to watch Supernatural. I watch as she puts up a black and white poster of the cast of The Outsiders. I watch as all the posters change over the years but not ours. Ours always stays right above the TV, right where she can see it from every angle of the room.
I’m there for her when she needs me the most. When it feels like she’s completely alone in the world, she picks me up and reads me again and again. We eventually moved from her favorite room to a place of her own. She puts me on the top shelf of the bookcase, the shelf where she keeps her favorite novels. She never loans me out to anyone, never wanting them to ruin me. Only her hands can hold me, only her fingers can flip my pages, only her eyes get to read my words a thousand times.
We moved from one apartment to another, and then to her first home. Every time she packs me with care, then I’m one of the first things she unpacks, and I’m always on the top shelf of the bookcase. She goes longer now without reading me, it hurts in a way, but honestly, I’m happy about it. It means she doesn’t need me as much. It means she has a fuller life now. She’s not sitting in the loneliness of her room with only me as her comfort.
It means, she’s no longer an outsider.
