on novels, music, and you

Ainsley Kennedy

I’ll get it signed, of course, my perfect-cornered, shiny-covered first edition copy, and your name will spill across the front pages, like a brand. I think it’ll go up on my bookshelf, in some place of honor. And I’ll love it forever, of course, but before I’ve even broken its spine I’ll buy your book again, but this time as a mass-market paperback, the kind with the thin pages that almost tear under your fingertips and the short, squat shape. That’s the one I’ll bring with me when I go to college, you know, and it’ll end up thrown on my covers and skated under my bed—the razor edges will get bent, pristine cover wavy from unexpected rainstorms and misjudged page turns. I won’t dog-ear the pages, but trust me when I say that there will be dents in the pages from when I slide my finger in to mark my place. 

And when your novel gets published—when it’s there in my hands? I think something is going to settle right in my chest. Did you know your world feels like coming home? I want to meet your characters. I’m convinced I already have. I listened to a song you said you liked the other day and I could almost see you, hunched over in the middle of the night typing on your google documents, humming along to the lyrics. Your characters were lip-syncing along, in my mind’s eye, and I never thought anything looked so right. 

I think maybe there are books out there that could make you feel warm inside, like maybe the sun is filling up your whole body with gold, and I think that your book will be one of those. I want to see you smile, see your readers smile, see you glow like all those authors I’ve seen at book signings. It would be so beautiful. And when your novel gets published, I want to document that warm, glorious feeling forever and trap it in the pages of the book you made with your own two hands.