I'll give you yours if you give me mine

Adventure Girl calls for amnesty on the return of borrowed things

I have a confession to make. I am a serial borrower.

In my study is a shelf bursting with ‘things that don’t belong to me’. Worse, I have a shelf of ‘things that might belong to me’. The problem is I can’t recall what was gifted and was loaned. Books by the same author, one a present, one on loan, and I can’t remember which was which! No tell-tale dog-ears or creases to give it away. These goods belong to people who have cherished and maintained their possessions, forever pristine.

It’s not as though I’ve watched / read / consumed each item and then simply laid it aside. Most times the reason I still have the item is because I haven’t quite gotten around to consuming it. In fact I have a backlog of un-checked-out items that I’m still working my way through. Purchases, gifts, and loans.

Some I’ve had for years and years.

The difficulty now is so much time has passed; it’s like returning that Grade 6 library book you found under your bed having sworn it was returned, the one you fought the crusty librarian over to waive an outrageous $12.93 accumulated fine.

Returning them now is just embarrassing.

But suddenly I find myself as that crusty librarian.

Last night I went looking for my copy of The Emerging Writers’ Festival Reader. I know I have it somewhere; it was a birthday present. In my mind, a niggling memory of someone peering covetously over my shoulder… and me handing it to them. Here, of course you can have a loan of it. Another memory surfaces. Of the Reader sitting on my desk alongside a second hand copy of Sheri S Tepper’s Grass, the one I hunted down for months in dodgy second hand bookshops, and ended up ordering online, just to own a paperback copy at last. You’ll love this, I hear myself say to a friend, Why don’t you borrow it…?

Then I see the empty ‘B’ section of my DVD collection taunting me. The gaps where my copies of Big Love ought to be… Who did I loan them to??? And where did my Presidents of the USA CD vanish to, all those years ago…?

Are all these items perched on someone else’s ‘things that don’t belong to me’ shelf? Are they too embarrassed to fess up and return them to me?

It seems there’s only one thing to be done. I need to hold an amnesty swap-meet.

Not that I can be that candid about it. Instead I’ll host some sort of social gathering out in Boganburbia, and while the blokes are singeing the snags or carbonising onion rings, and the girls are peering at my pitiful stiletto collection, I can subtly point out the ‘things that aren’t mine’ shelf, and veer them past the pile of ‘things that might be mine’, and between rounds of bubbly top-ups and music exchanges, ask ‘where on earth did that Presidents CD go?'

With any luck, by the end of the night, as people step back inside to grab a drink or go to the loo, everybody’s belongings will have returned themselves to their rightful owners, discreetly and anonymously.

And unlike the haunted library book, no one’s things need end up discarded along with that strawberry jam sandwich and mouldy orange you never told your mum about, just for the sake of misplaced pride.

-AG