I laid them on the airport marble, spine to spine. Arkansas International, Fence, POETRY, New England Review, North American Review… Could I spare Life A User’s Manual by Georges Perec? As I debated over which books to abandon, I wondered how many travelers abandoned books at airports around the world every day. Among all the lost water bottles and trinkets, how many stories were stranded in dark corner rooms for thirty days before being destroyed, donated, or sold?

Or, perhaps, shipped out to a Salvation Army. Or to a luxury hotel. Or even to the local library, where, inevitably, a habitual collector of ephemera will trade quarters for your lost stories. Before the book has left the mind, the physical book has already begun to decay. Adults cling onto their childhood dolls until they are little more strips of static. In Katja Kemnitz’s photograph collection “Too Much Love,” a monkey’s button eyes pop from the skull, a lamb lies shriveled in the darkness, and a doll stands limply from years of strangulation. I love that which I am partially responsible for destroying. In probably the most famous quotation from Rings of Saturn, a book I ended up stuffing next to the pickle chips I’d bought at John’s Grocery during an observatory focused on liminal spaces (the cash register, I reasoned to myself, could be a liminal space, too), WG Sebald writes: “On every new thing lies already the shadow of annihilation.”

None of the airport websites mention how exactly books are “destroyed,” but there is an unsurprising completeness to the cycle which ends in demise. I ended up gutting my carry on to make room for William Carlos Williams and Lucia Berlin. I wedged the literary magazines into every possible compartment. (I’d spent hours combing the shelves of the Haunted Bookshop, reaching for the farthest corners while a cat named Soph (Sophocles) brushed against my ankles. In Prairie Lights, Iowa City’s independent bookstore, I’d wandered the aisles, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of literature that surrounded me) I might have looked like some crazy fool at baggage check, but I made it home with just a couple bent corners. I then spent an exorbitant amount of time rearranging my bookshelf.

As goes the popular anecdote, Einstein once filled his closet with homogenous clothing to prevent himself from expending precious energy on what to wear. There is no evidence of this. My ritual of rearranging my bookshelf, whether by the color of the spines, or by the publication date, or by author name, or even by preference, is simply an exercise in recataloguing what is familiar. I cannot pretend that the books on my shelf are still the same books that sat on my shelf yesterday, just as I cannot pretend that I am the same person that I was two weeks before

arriving in Iowa City as part of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio this past summer. On the first night, the RAs gathered us into the common area for a strict warning. Don’t waste your time here. Although I hadn’t wasted my time in Iowa City, I had wasted time before and I couldn’t bear to waste time again.

I could read for eternity and still never catch up. And I’m okay with that.