To the Stranger Who Underlined This Sentence

I don’t know you.

I don’t know when you held this book,

where you were sitting,

or why this particular sentence made your pencil stop.

But I found your line today.

It was faint.

A little crooked.

You started underneath the first word

and somehow drifted upward by the last.

You didn’t even use a ruler.

Good.

For a second, I stopped reading the author

and started reading you.

I wondered what happened

the first time you reached these words.

Did they remind you of someone?

Did you finally find a sentence

for something you’d been trying to explain?

Were you heartbroken?

Were you happy?

Or did you simply think,

that’s a good line.

Maybe I’m giving you too much credit.

Maybe you underlined half the book.

Still,

this was the sentence I found.

And now there are three of us here:

the person who wrote it,

the person who underlined it,

and the stranger trying to understand

why you did.

That’s a strange little thing books can do.

Someone was here before me

A used book is one of the few things we buy

and secretly hope isn’t completely new.

Give me the folded corner.

The coffee stain.

The name written inside the cover

in handwriting nobody uses anymore.

Give me the receipt from a shop

that closed twelve years ago.

Give me a flower pressed so flat

that it’s almost become paper.

Give me a sentence with a question mark beside it.

Someone lived with this book before I did.

They carried it somewhere.

They put it beside their bed.

They forgot it on a train.

Maybe they loved it.

Maybe they never finished it.

And somehow it kept travelling.

Until it reached me.

We didn’t read the same book

That’s the part I like most.

You underlined a sentence

I might have walked straight past.

Perhaps the paragraph that changed something in me

meant absolutely nothing to you.

Same pages.

Same words.

Different lives standing behind them.

Maybe that’s why a book can never really be read twice.

Even by the same person.

You come back five years later

thinking the story has stayed exactly where you left it.

It has.

You haven’t.

Suddenly a character you hated makes sense.

A sentence you ignored feels unbearable.

Something you once thought romantic

now looks a little sad.

The ink didn’t move.

You did.

So I left you something too

A few pages after your underline,

I found my own sentence.

I almost marked it.

Then I hesitated.

This isn’t my book forever.

One day it might sit on another shelf.

Someone might pick it up for £3.

Someone might borrow it and forget to return it.

Someone might open it years from now

and find both of us inside.

Your crooked underline.

My tiny mark in the margin.

Two people who will probably never meet,

having a conversation neither of us knew we were having.

So I took the pencil.

And beside one sentence, very lightly, I wrote:

me too.

Maybe you’ll never see it.

Actually, you almost certainly won’t.

But perhaps somebody else will.

And for one small moment,

while they’re supposed to be reading the book,

they’ll wonder about us.

Image

⁠Open the original image on Unsplash — I picked this specifically because the handwritten annotations already feel like another reader has left part of themselves behind. It’s also free to use under the Unsplash License.