The Second Reading

9:20 a.m. Took a twelve-year-old novel down from the shelf. One page in, I meet my old underlines. Blue ballpoint, drawn against a ruler. The reader I am now doesn't use a ruler. A habit I can't even remember giving up has been kept, perfectly preserved, inside the underlines.

10:30 a.m. The underlines feel foreign. There are lines under sentences I can no longer see the point of, while sentences I would fold a corner for today walk past unmarked. The twenty-something reader and the one sitting here seem to be reading two different books with the same title. An underline, it turns out, is not a list of good sentences. It is a list of what I was colliding with at the time.

Noon. Over lunch I opened my phone instead of the book. Not a rule violation; messages from three years ago were on the rereading list too. Somewhere in the first essay of this series, I wrote about an evening spent scrolling up and up through old messages while waiting for a reply. That time I read in order to wait. Today I read in order to read. The same motion of the thumb, and an entirely different act. In the old conversation, the other person asks the same thing twice, and both times I answer something else. What was invisible three years ago is visible today at a glance.

3 p.m. Met a folded page. A corner turned down by the person I was twelve years ago. I read the page twice looking for the reason and couldn't find it. I left something in this spot once, and there is no claim ticket. I folded the corner back down, unfound. It can belong to the next rereading.

5:40 p.m. While the window turns orange, a note on the difference between rereading and remembering. Memory is an abridged edition, and the abridging is redone, every time, by whoever I am that day. Rereading is checking the abridgement against the original. The original usually wins. A reply I remembered as warm turns out to be businesslike. A quarrel I remembered as long and vicious turns out to be six short messages.

10 p.m. The novel's last chapter. A story whose ending you know reads slower than it did the first time; there is no longer any reason to hurry. Only now do I notice the sentences standing along the road to the ending. If a first reading is about where a story goes, a second reading is about how it gets there.

12:40 a.m. Last entry of the day. I hesitated a long while over whether to add a new underline, then drew one, in pencil. Today's pencil beside the twelve-year-old ballpoint. Whoever opens this book next will find two readers sharing one margin. That both of them are me is that person's problem.