Shout-out to My Fifteen Year Old Self

  This past week has been hectic. My boyfriend and I have decided to make our living arrangement official and settle down at my house permanently. In an effort to be a good girlfriend, I've been sorting through my junk stuff. At one point, I thought we were just going to tape the bedroom in half like roommates. It's true; I have way too much stuff.

  In the midst of the massive cleaning, I found something that took me by absolute surprise. Tucked away in the corner of my desk, I found a little list from when I was fifteen years old. (Holy crap. That's ten years ago.) It was a list of all of J.R.R. Tolkien's books and all of the books on Middle Earth that seemed credible. Only four of them were marked off; The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Book of Lost Tales. Part Two, and The Silmarillion. 

  It was such a surreal moment whenever I found that list. I was transported back to ten years ago, and I remembered that exact moment that J.R.R. Tolkien left a searing imprint on my heart with his stories. Middle Earth felt so much like home that I scoured the internet to find every book I could about it. I'm not too ashamed to say that I shed a tear whenever I held that little scrap of paper in my hand.

My Tolkien Shelf.

  I wish I could give the list back to my fifteen year old self after I marked off all of my acquisitions since then. Each slash of the pen through a book on the list felt like a promise to my younger self that I had been able to keep. The list is by no means completely checked off, but the fact that I was able to mark some of the books off gives me hope that this crazy literary dream of mine to own all of these books is possible.