Reading comes to us in phases now. It's like craving a piece of chocolate cake. Once you see it, you gotta have it. No other dessert would do.  But when you've had it, you can go for months on end without it.

Because life distracts and deprives us of this pleasure, it comes with full force. Binge reading.
We lie in bed for days with curtains wide open and legs entwined under the same blanket. We read. Book after book. Dylan more than me. The man can really get through books like I can get through a box of peanuts.

Sometimes we read multiple books at a time. Kind of how you'd watch the first episode of different shows to see which one you want to binge first or binge properly.

Sometimes I could let some books go. I don't take to everything. But Dylan rarely ever does that. Sure he'd have plenty of half read books. Marked by his quirky bookmarks, but you bet he'll finish them sooner or later.

The first thing the man does when he goes to any bookstore is look through the jar of those old $1 bookmarks and picks out a few. The last thing he does at any gift shop is the same. He'll spend a good 10 minutes before checkout in front of one of those rotating kiosks neatly stacked with postcards and magnets and bookmarks and carefully decides on this pick.

But the poor bookmarks never make it to his books. I know he has every intention to use them when he buys them. But it never works out. I do not know the fate of these bookmarks because I rarely see them again. And I have learned to not pick this battle with him. (Husbands could have far worse habits than bookmark hoarding).

Instead you'll find old receipts, train tickets, clothes tags, tissue papers, dried leaves (that were fresh leaves when first used for this purpose) and even airplane plane boarding passes being used as bookmarks. That's how you can tell my books apart from Dylan'. Mine are neatly decorated with vintage bookmarks, colorful, magnetic, stick on bookmarks, bookmarks with tassels, and bookmarks the point to the exact line of the text. He'll have the entire world's crap in his books marking his pages except a real bookmark. I used to offer him mine but after they met the same fate as his own, I not only stopped offering, I actively started protecting mine from him.

During our binge reading days, you'll find books everywhere. Half open, half closed, upside down. By our legs on the bed, snuggling by the arms, stray ones on top of the sheets, and finally the lucky one in our hands.

Our cat would come from time to time to check on us. Sometimes she would sit for hours on the other side of the bed giving us judgmental looks, sometimes carefully balancing herself on top of a book ensuring that her entire body including her tail sits within the four corners of that book. The lucky book would be her chosen throne for the day, which means it would be very inaccessible to us. Dylan says she's reading by osmosis. I think she's just telling us who's the boss.

Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night with something jamming into my ribs. It would be a book I'd forget to put away before falling asleep. An aftermath of staying up several nights, bingeing. 

I was cleaning my stuff from the basement of my parent's house that had been sitting there for probably six years. I haven't lived in this house for the last eight years but it's amazing how every time I go back, I find more of my things than I'd like to accept. Most of them are books, old memorabilia, old clothes, knick knacks, and what not, and some things that my mother has just saved from my childhood, like my drawings and writings and published articles. But those don't count because she has made it abundantly clear that's her property and not mine. I am okay with that. Less things for me to clean.

I used to be the one for holding on to stuff. Perhaps that's why I have so many things sitting in this basement. I don't  know when it changed, but I could really care less about a lot of things now. What should have been a road down memory lane, seemed more like looking at someone else's life. When I looked at those things, it was as if I was looking at them for the first time. Term papers from high school, journals with emotions poured on them that I don't remember existed, paintings I am certain drawn by someone else, photos of a girl that looks nothing like me, with people I barely remember. Training manuals and textbooks I learned nothing from. Perhaps the only thing I remembered and saved were cards and letters and some books. Perhaps those were the only things that really mattered. That ever really matter.

Dylan who was helping me, on the other hand, was utterly fascinated with everything. Reading every paper I wrote, and smiling at every silly journal entry, and simultaneously being horrified at how quickly I was putting paper through the shredder. At one point we almost got into an argument over which things should be thrown and which shouldn't. I am still quite certain that he hid a few things from me, which may surface later.  It's amazing how our silly lives we don't even remember can be so fascinating to others.

I am not saying that the part of my life contained in this basement was a waste or was a bad time in my life. No. None of that. It was just ordinary with it's ups and downs. I held on to things because I thought that years from now I will somehow look back at this time so fondly and somehow nostalgia will be so comforting. But the truth is, its not. It's either full of regrets, or full of longing or in my case, it's full of, really, nothing. The fact is, I have forgotten. I don't feel the emotions looking back at my high school days I was hoping to feel when I was in high school. Things aren't as important. Things aren't even as complicated. All I have now is a basement full of crap and a day full of cleaning that I could have spent doing something else. Lighten your loads, people. The important memories, you'll always remember. You won't need reminders for that.