Postcard From Baboo

"Being surprised by a FIND...exactly the way I FOUND Alisha."

The nearly ceiling height bookshelf in my room hides a piece of Baboo, a treasure given to me while in my senior year of high school not long after I admitted all the love I held in my heart for him only. Although a simple token of affection, I hold it in high regards just because he presented it to me—along with the 1983 premiere issue of Vanity Fair, which published a novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my favorite author. (He said that I deserved to read the novella in its original format.) Baboo was the first ever to give me such a unique present, though the magazine is not as important now as the other item included in the package—a postcard. The front of the postcard pictures an olden day city with men dressed in nice suits, browsing a long stall filled with books, though the note on the back is what really makes the postcard meaningful.

Once using the postcard as a bookmark—giving me an excuse to read the message written on the back time and time again—it hides inside a novel perched on my bookshelf, though I cannot remember the exact one. Taking down “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Marquez, I flip the pages between my thumb looking for my hidden piece of Baboo with no luck, so I replace it and grab another book—Anne Sexton’s “Complete Poems”—but successfully fail again. Scanning the other book titles, I ask myself which novel I read around the time Baboo bestowed me with the gifts and suddenly feel a kick of instinct in my gut that insists “The Golden Notebook,” written by Doris Lessing, holds my beloved postcard. Right on the money, I pull out the stiff cardboard-type paper and flip it over, eager to re-hydrate my memory with the words it thirsts for.

Sidewalk of Paris, 1920s.

All those books—beats a long day spent in church, temple, or a mosque. Sometimes the thrill is in seeking, browsing for a book—any book, not any particular one—and then WHAM!! Being surprised by a FIND—a Great Book—exactly the way I FOUND Alisha.

Love, xoxo”

My search over, I allow myself to cry for the first time in two days, a much needed version of relief from the sorrow knotting my chest to my stomach. I need his words desperately, though the ones I own do not compensate for the words I want to hear, the sort that flow straight from his mouth to my ear in present time. The postcard suffices for now because I know that everything Baboo wrote was straight from the heart, that he meant everything down to the “xoxo.” The memory of love is all I hold onto, and with this postcard as my lone tangible, handwritten evidence that Baboo loved Alisha—it is the only safety raft I can turn to when I feel the distressed waters of my mind increase in turbulence.