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Stains On A White Page
Stains On A White Page
There’s a small cupboard in my room full of story books I possess. Among these, my favorite book yet, is a blue and green hardback, because it reminds me of a simpler time, when small excerpts of texts could well-justify, standing outside a bookstore in an extremely long queue at night.
I still pick up that blue and green hardback from time to time, even though I have read this book a million times. Only this time around, when I picked up the book, I found out something that I have been doing to this book for ten years, without even noticing.
The top sentence on the upper right corner of page number 72 has a round blemish,
right where the text ends in an almost illegible small hyphen. This book, perfect in all other aspects, is frustratingly flawed when it comes to page 72 and I realized that the sole reason this flaw has outweighed the near perfect beauty of my book, is me.
It all started, now I remember, when I was first reading this page, and appreciating the smoothness of the paper, the consistent white background of the leaf over which the te
xt was written in a perfect black Garamond font and I saw a small, almost imperceptible, black dot on the upper right corner of the first sentence in the page. Even though the whole book had no other defects and this small stain was barely visible, it irked me to the point that I got up, found my ink eraser and tried to remove this small mark. Over the course of the next ten years, I would, time and again, read the book, find the page with the small stain- that was growing into a full blown blemish helped by my inept interference -and try to remove the spot.
The top right corner of the first line, which ends in a hyphen on page 72, of the blue and green hardback I possess, has a gaping hole now, and every time I look at it, it piques me even more. I am not satisfied, when I can't mend the page back to its former condition. I wish now, for something as sweet as a small unobtrusive imperfection. Instead, I am left with a cavernous chasm. I wish I could make my younger self understand that small imperceptible stains on pearly white pages are inconsequential and irrelevant if left unperturbed.
