On this page

There’s a book on my shelf.

The spine is creased, the pages dog-eared. A bookmark sits somewhere around the middle, frozen in time.
It’s been like that for years.

Every now and then, I glance at it. Think about picking it up again.
But I don’t.

Life gets in the way. The urgent overrules the important.

I tell myself, I’ll get back to it when I have the time.
But do we ever?

This book is stubborn, though.
It doesn’t let me forget it’s there.
It’s always watching, lurking in the background like a to-do list with a grudge.

And every time I catch its gaze, I feel a pang.
Not guilt, exactly. More like an itch I can’t quite scratch.

The bookmark—it’s the worst part.
A literal reminder of how far I got before I stopped.
Like a referee blowing the whistle in the middle of my best move.

We all have bookmarks in our lives, don’t we?
Projects we abandoned. Hobbies we promised to master.
Letters we meant to write.

They sit there, half-finished, whispering:
“You gave up.”

But maybe the whisper’s wrong.
Maybe they’re not accusing us.
Maybe they’re waiting.

Waiting for us to remember why we started.

See, the funny thing about unfinished books is that they don’t go anywhere.
They’re patient.
They wait for us to come back.

And when we do, something magical happens.
The words are still there, of course. But we’ve changed.
The person who put the bookmark in isn’t the same person who pulls it out.

That’s the twist, isn’t it?

The unfinished book isn’t just about the book.
It’s about us.

We start things when we’re one person, and we finish them when we’re someone else.
Someone braver, maybe. Or someone more tired.
Someone who’s lived a little more.

It’s not the bookmark’s fault we stopped.
Stopping isn’t failure. It’s a pause.

And here’s the thing about pauses: they’re not the end of the story.
They’re the breath between chapters.

So tonight, I’ll pick up that book.
Not because I have to.
But because I want to see who I’ve become since the last time I held it.

And maybe, just maybe, that unfinished book will teach me how to finish something else.

After all, isn’t life just a series of unfinished chapters waiting for us to turn the page?