They never read what I underlined.
Not the bold declarations at the heart of the paragraph, not the loud metaphors that critics quote in essays—but the fragments I scribbled in the margins. Those soft, slanted thoughts written in faint pencil, as though I wasn't sure I had the right to say them out loud.
That's where I lived.
Not in the plot, but in the pause.
Not in the story, but beside it.
I used to carry a pen in one hand and a secret in the other. Every book I read became a mirror, and the margins were where I responded. Not to analyze, not to summarize—but to survive. I didn't annotate for clarity. I annotated for company.
I'd draw a shaky star next to a sentence that stabbed too close.
I'd scrawl "me too" in the corner when a character cracked open.
I'd ask questions I didn't really want answered:
Why does this feel like home?
Why can't I say this in real life?
Why do I feel seen and terrified at the same time?
To most readers, these were just footnotes. Background noise. But to me, they were echoes—my voice trying to find itself in someone else's language.
---
One day, someone borrowed one of my books without asking.
It was a friend, casual and careless. They flipped through the pages and laughed, "You write in your books like they're journals." I smiled politely, but inside, I folded into silence.
They didn't know those scribbles were a lifeline.
That a quick note in the margin of a poem about silence was written on a night I couldn't stop crying.
That the single word—*"ache"—*underlined three times, was the only word I could find for what I couldn't explain to anyone else.
That these weren't just comments. They were confessions.
---
No one ever taught me that margins were a place for the soul.
We were told to stay inside the lines. Obey the structure. Let the author do the talking.
But I couldn't do that.
I had to answer.
I had to say something back, even if it was just, "I hear you."
Even if it was just, "This hurt me, too."
Even if it was just, "I'm still here."
When I look back now at those old books, I don't remember the plot points. I remember the handwriting. The smudged graphite from pages revisited too often. The slightly torn edge where I pressed too hard on a memory. The ink that bled when I read under rain.
I remember who I was in the margins. And how safe it felt to speak in whispers.
So much of writing isn't what's said.
It's what's almost said.
What's circled but never spoken.
What's hinted at with a line and left unresolved in the corner of a page.
And maybe that's why the margins matter.
Because they hold the truths too fragile to stand at the center.
Because they're where the echoes go when there's no room in the sentence for the soul.