WHAT SITS ON BOOKSHELVES

“To Michelle, Christmas ‘80. Love, Linda.” I read outloud to myself the message on the first page of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own I bought at Secret Treasures Antiques earlier. In pretty handwriting and blue ink it was shoved in the smallest corner, trying not to impose upon the book’s contents. “Are Michelle and Linda alive?” is my first thought. It’s a practical, unemotional message from Linda, as if she was unbothered by sentiment. No well wishes penned, no affection to be gleaned between the two people besides the common, yet intimate signature, “Love.” Were they coworkers, and this an office secret santa obligation? Or does the simple statement of fact elude to years worth of Christmases together. Why would their affection need to be recorded, when every year that passes is proof of it? What’s more important is remembering this book’s place in their long relationship; it is just one of countless gifts and they risk losing track of when it was given. Linda and Michelle continue to float around my head as I try to read, turning pages hesitantly, like I am intruding on their space; a voyeur seeing something I shouldn’t have.

The door to Secret Treasures Antiques pushes in, and chimes with a pleasant bell. The thin, January sunlight streams through the windows, growing richer as it pools on the floor in abstract patterns. Sun soaked wood smells warm, evocative of that period of time we simply call, “long ago.” With the smell of dust in the air, I am a child again, lazily dusting my grandmother's bookshelf. I never bothered to take down the trinkets that sat among the books, I just wiped half-heartedly as I examined them: porcelain dolls, a box with two ornate glass balls, a Tibetan singing bowl, old birthday cards, trophies, stress balls, candlesticks. I wonder where they are now? They could be in a store just like this one, or they simply disappeared into the ether, as things tend to do after many years of no one noticing them.

Soft rock plays unobtrusively over the speakers, gently, so I hardly notice the way it fills the corners of the room, making the space softer and smaller. I walk with a kind of reverence that the sun-warmed room asks kindly for.

It’s impossible to look at everything in this place, as unique merchandise fills every free space from floor to ceiling. Pacing around the shop, only slightly bigger than a large bathroom, is like foraging out in nature. Nothing is promised tomorrow to be where it was today. Items are organized by type and category, so that kitchen items are together, silverware is together, china is together, sewing supplies and fabric are together, and miscellaneous trinkets are together.

I wore a blue velvet dress with pink roses and white tights to my great grandma Ella’s funeral and I didn’t cry. My dad came home later with two plastic gallon bags, overflowing with Ella’s costume jewelry. It was huge, chunky, and gaudy, a tangled mess of chaos stuffed in a bag For make-believe and overall princess fantasists, it was a pot of gold delivered to my sister and I’s door. We dumped the ripped bags of jewelry out onto the new carpet in our basement and went hunting. Most of it was a dark, tarnished silver that may have once had a gold lacquer, now like the chain mail of a knight. There were too many brooches which I, at five, found unfashionable. One necklace was made of cherry-red plastic balls as big as a cherry itself, and juicy, like I could put them in my mouth and eat them whole. There was a turquoise necklace made of thin disks of wood stacked next to each other, so it slithered like a snake in the grass when I shook it. My skin caught between the pieces of wood when it moved, like an animal – so far from jewelry. The collection hardly attempted to be beautiful, disarming the hopeful wearer, as if asking Ella, and I, to be beautiful enough to bear it around her neck. We grabbed from the pile playing dress up, the necklaces becoming essential character building in our many stories. I secretly kept a very modest pair of clip-on earrings hidden away because my sister would have been mad if she knew I wasn’t sharing. Most of the costume jewelry was too loud and noticeable and not beautiful without my great grandma beneath it, and was now a homogenous, tangled ball behind our bins of princess dresses. The earrings I kept are gold lions sitting atop a cherry red oval; the red necklace’s mates. I imbued these with her spirit, and my good will towards her memory even though I was too young to know her, or to mourn her beyond the simple sadness of death. They came to represent her to me in a way that was perhaps more than they deserved. She may never have touched those little lions, much less worn them, or thought fondly of them, but to me, they were proof of her existence. I never wore them, and they are still sitting on my dresser today, untouched.

I pass the mannequin covered in pins, the scrabble tiles, the dominos, the handkerchiefs, knitting needles, game pieces, gloves, rubber stamps, cheap trophies, slide rulers, key chains, postcards, seashells, “Wacky Key Chains”, cookie cutters, matchboxes, plastic grapes, dirty silver costume jewelry, skeleton keys and the “Rack O’Fun” (bags of fake leaves, shells, and happy meal toys). A full bowl of loose playing cards. Another full of bottle openers and “other fun items”. Each of these gems sits in their own spot with a sign and price. There is some cognitive dissonance involved in seeing this organization. These things – cards, matchboxes, dominos, scrabble tiles – are not supposed to be orderly. They exist in the dirty corners of things, only to inevitably be chewed up by a vacuum or kicked under the fridge.

Things. Things people owned. Things with a permanent place in my grandmother’s kitchen, like a hand cranked nut-chopper, or thick ceramic dinnerware painted with various large fruits. I zero in on the bottom shelf, at a soft elephant about the size of my hand. The edges of my vision shimmer and my heart beats in my head, “Is that mine?” Of course it’s not. But my stomach still dropped for the moment when my precious Baby Elephant was here instead of the plates, like the fates were hovering their scissors over my string, and staring right at me, ready to snip. The only evidence of my existence might one day be my old pin cushion, sitting in a pile of other people’s old pin cushions. No one will know that it was a gift from my sister, because she thought it was beautiful with its pink and blue flowers, and she thought I would like it. The weight of this I am hardly able to bear.

Just before I moved out of my college apartment after graduation, I fought with my roommate about my things. My perpetually limited bank account left me little money to spend on cross country shipping, so I donated over half my belongings, taking two full car loads to Goodwill. She yelled at me because I wouldn’t keep my plastic cutting board, and didn’t want our pasta strainer. I yelled back “I will buy another cutting board. I can't take much” and “I have never in my life used a pasta strainer, I don’t need it! Leave me alone!” Our misplaced anger masked the fear of our impending goodbye – suddenly there were conversations about impermanence and about not needing. About things that matter, and things that don’t.

The things that matter are not resigned to a life on a shelf, but afforded it; no sooner do they gather dust than it is carefully wiped away by the loving, microfiber cloth of one who treasures them. A collection of things, upon my possession, has grown into an autonomous being, pulsing with life and glittering like a memory of all that I am. I am attached to the things in which I identify something of myself; I can hide in them the part of myself that fears being lost in life’s impermanence. It's my trash that is still unimportant in the face of many years of ownership. I didn’t bother to consider the perspective of that cutting board when I threw it out. It will never have another owner, instead succumbing to the elements in whatever landfill it ends up in, bacteria slowly rotting it away.

The floor has emptied out considerably, and without the bustle of people, the air in here is heavier and more grim. Only the hosts are left at this party, to pick up everyone’s trash in silence. This antique store is built upon depersonalization, displaying objects separated from their matrix collection and the person they once represented. The stench of their unhappy displacement is nauseating. I walk carefully through the museum of a thousand different lives as told by the souvenirs of the everyday. In my own museum, I fill another corner with a small trinket, or a cabinet with another pretty dish, so that suddenly, at twenty years old, my things fill a full 10x10 storage unit, meant for one to three bedrooms. When the trinkets on my bookshelf catch my eye in a hurried moment, they mock me, saying “I am excess.” But in the next breath I’m compelled by their siren song, and they are beautiful, interesting, and wholly necessary again.

I need to buy something. I glance down and grab the first thing I see – a ceramic swan, whose wings come together making a bowl – for a reasonable $10. I picture myself wiping the dust off and putting my rings in it. In seven months, when I pack my life in boxes to move again, and am faced with the reality of how many things I have collected over my short life, I will hate this swan. In a fit of minimalism I will donate it, or throw it away, having forgotten the feeling of seeing a sweet swan on a bookshelf that belongs to me.

What will become of my grandmother’s china? She is moving out of her home of forty years, she has no space for all her pretty things anymore. But all of us already have full storage units. It cannot all be saved. Will she cry as she drops boxes off at the antique store? She did when she packed it into boxes, realizing that part of her life was over.

Finally, at the back of the store, is the matrix all our things rely on; what they will try, but always fail, to fully represent. A person, in black and white. There’s a whole bowl of them, old family photos and portraits with dates on the back, and sometimes names. If I fulfill my duty to care for other people’s things, I hope someone will do the same for my loved ones, and for me. I hope someone buys my grandmother’s china. If they do, they will feel the ghost of the hands that touched each piece. With a soft rustle, the sisters that drank hot chocolate from pink tea cups are young again, floating forever in the sunlight, and giggling with whipped cream on their lips. Maybe someone will buy my photograph–one of the good ones, where my eyes are open and bright, my smile is free and wide, and I look exactly like myself. Someone will gaze upon my face even after it no longer stirs recognition in anyone’s heart. I will make sure to write my name on the back, and maybe they will even say it aloud, spending quiet moments just daydreaming about who I once was.

Annalise C Biesterfeld is a queer, Brooklyn-based writer. A graduate of Northwestern University, she works as an essayist and environmental anthropologist, combining creative non-fiction and ethnographic writing to present unique, human stories.