Mismatched Mishmash

When you enter my room, I want your eyes to be drawn to my bookshelves.

I have three of them. One usually hides its contents from view, a tall, yellow-white-and-green bookcase with five shelves. Two of them flank my window.

And they're full. More than full, actually, as their inhabitants spill out onto the floor, are doubled up in places. My books lie haphazardly on top of each other. They're stacked here and there in sets of four or five, so that they don't fall over.

My books are a hodge-podge mix of blues and reds and blacks, orange and green sometimes peeking out from between their multicolored friends, and even pink making an appearance. They're a mismatched mixture of mass-market paperbacks and hardcovers, a collection of used and new books picked up at the local library book sale and at book shops all across the world.

If you notice nothing else in my room, not the photos on my walls, not the knick-knacks picked up from my time spent travelling and creations I've made myself, not the dried-up starfish and iridescent shells from a family friend, I want you to notice my books.

They occupy my bookshelves, impossibly disorganized, with no two books the same size next to each other. New books and old share the same shelf, from classics to children's books. Young adult and adult books sit squashed next to each other on a shelf that's a little bit too full, their pages being compressed by books on either side of them. Finding places for my books is no easy task, yet it's one I quite enjoy.

This mishmash of mismatched books is what I want you to notice when you walk into my room.

The Dandy Lioness