Ping Louise
@louiseping3491
10 days ago
I was sixteen, awkward, and convinced that I was the only person in Kampala who had read Sylvia Plath. This was before the internet made every lonely teenager feel like a discovered genius. I had discovered *The Bell Jar* in a corner of the Uganda Library Services on Buganda Road, the one with the perpetually broken air conditioner and the smell of old paper and dust that gets into your clothes. I checked it out three times. The third time, I didn't bring it back.
It wasn't a dramatic heist. There was no trench coat, no shifty eyes at the circulation desk. I just... kept it. I slid it into my school bag between my math textbook and a crushed packet of Nairasha biscuits. I walked past the "Please Return Books" sign, past the guard who was half-asleep in the plastic chair, and out onto the sun-baked pavement. My heart was a small, tight drum. But I didn't turn back.
Why did I do it? It was not a book I couldn't afford. It was not a book I couldn't find elsewhere. The truth is uglier and more specific: I needed to own it. I needed it to be mine, physically mine, not borrowed. At that age, everything felt borrowed. My clothes were hand-me-downs from a cousin in London. My opinions were borrowed from my English teacher, Miss Nakato, who wore cowrie shells in her hair and talked about Maya Angelou like she was a living ancestor. My life felt like a draft I was too scared to finish. But this book, this yellowed paperback with the cracked spine, felt like the original. And I wanted to be the original owner of something beautiful.
I still have it. It sits on a shelf in my current apartment in Nairobi, between a signed copy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s *Wizard of the Crow* and a dog-eared *Things Fall Apart*. The Plath book has a faded blue stamp on the inside cover: "Uganda Library Services. Please Return." I never did. I look at that stamp now, at twenty-eight, and I don't feel guilt. I feel a strange, sharp tenderness for that sixteen-year-old girl who was so hungry for a voice that matched her own private tumult that she committed a small, silent crime.
The book is not just a book. It's a fossil of a self I used to be. It's the memory of a Kampala that no longer exists - the library with the clacking ceiling fans, the chipped Formica tables, the man who whispered to himself in the poetry section. It's the moment I first realized that art could be a possession, not just an experience. It could be a secret you kept in your bag.
I know I should probably return it. Drive back to Kampala, walk into the library, and slide it onto the shelf. But I know what would happen. I would look at the shelf and see a different copy, a newer one. My old one, with my fingerprints on every page, would just be a book again. And I'm not ready for that. I'm still that girl, holding onto the evidence of her own awakening.
I stole a book. And it taught me how to be a reader who writes, not just borrows. #nircleneighbour #motivationalmonday #streetartkenya #tribecalledjudah #easternugandatravel #veganlifestyle #nirclelifestyles #untamedafrica #longstreetcapetown #kenyaecotravel #stolenlibrarybooks #ugandalibrarymemories #Notes
