To Whomever Borrowed My Lolita

"Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!"

I can’t remember who you are, but you were probably at my house when I was drunk and I probably lent it to you after gushing about until you were so sick of hearing me talking that you took it so I’d shut up. I hope you’ve read it by now, but it’s probably just sitting in a pile behind your couch. And that’s such a shame, because it’s so damn good. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Have you at least gotten that far yet? Probably not, otherwise you would’ve read the whole book without stopping, then given it back to me, and we could be talking about Humbert and the love/loathe obsession with him we now surely share. ”Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” How can you not be enraptured with that kind of enrapture?

"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul..."

Wanted, wanted: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Cover: paper; a picture of a girl in mary janes.

Pages: worn and marked.

Age: close to five thousand three hundred days?

Profession: my favorite book.

Okay that was sappy, but if you’d read the book you’d get what I was going for. I’m just lonely for my book. But you know what? I don’t want it back. I want you to read it, and write in it lovingly. Once your tongue’s tip has tripped its steps enough that you don’t need to read it to repeat, give it to someone else to read. That, after all is why books are great. If you gave it back, I’d just put it on my shelf, and it’d once again be my pretty object, there for me to fondle its pages if I so chose. But then I’d be an H.H., confusing an object with an idea. I love Lolita; not the paper it’s printed on. Instead, I’ll get a DRM-free copy, then I won’t need to worry about anything but the perfect language and having it forever. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

 S.C.