There is something indescribably intimate about the act of interrupting one’s reading, the act of marking one’s place in a book, a subtle gesture that holds within it the tension between one moment and the next. Not the closing of a book, not that which implies rest or abandonment, but this gesture: the gentle sliding between its pages of a torn piece of paper, a frayed ribbon, a leaf, a flower, a receipt, a strip of fabric, a scrap of cardboard, a memory of the Danube, a ghost embrace. The quiet insistence of an I-will-return. Here is where I paused. Here is a silence I could not pass through. I will return. The promise of a coming that is already something else, for the thought itself is already somewhere else. A mark of elsewhereness.

A bookmark, however fragile, however durable, holds a paradox. It is both a pause and a continuation, both memory and forgetting. I do not mark a page to remember what I have already read, but to return to what I have not yet learnt. A bookmark is a placeholder not for knowledge, but for desire. The bookmark becomes a bridge between two worlds: the world of the written text and the ever-evolving world of the self. It carries time; it carries memory; it carries intention. When adorned with notes, quotes or fleeting thoughts, a bookmark is no longer just a marker; it becomes a repository of personal fragments, unfinished ideas and the quiet whispers of the mind that refuse to be pinned down, confined to the solitude of a page or a neatly-composed notebook.

I have always been drawn to what is unfinished. As a child, I rarely completed drawings. I left them open, deliberately, perhaps due to the haste of wanting to live more, to encounter more. A wing without a body. A sun with no sky. When I began to write, I did so not in notebooks but in margins, on books, but also on walls, fences, stones. I wrote not to preserve but to expose – to allow something in me to be touched by air, by time, by the weathering of what cannot be said. I, of course, did not know that.

My grandmother, always with a knowing smile, would leave around just the tools for this: pens, paints, bowls of ink, the occasional scrap of cloth or wood awaiting my mark. I did not yet know that this writing was a dialogue, that my marks were more than mere symbols, that they were a search for meaning, for a way to inhabit and be inhabited.

In the intersection of ink and paper, of thought and feeling, the bookmark is not merely an inanimate object; it is a companion, a witness to the act of becoming. In writing on bookmarks, in writing to create a bookmark, I write not just in response to the book before me, but in dialogue with something deeper: with a part of myself that emerges only in the presence of words.

Writing now about my bookmarks, I am reminded of the small, quiet traces that we leave behind – both in books and in life. These simple objects carry within them the delicate threads of our existence, and perhaps, just as much as the words on the pages they mark, they are a reflection of who we are, how we read, and what we leave unsaid. There is, in these lines, a poetics of interruption, desire and trace. Anchored in the intimate gesture of marking a page, reading turns into a site of becoming, where the marginal, ephemeral and unfinished hold space for the emergence of the self. Is it not then that the bookmark is a site of rupture?

Today, my bookmarks feel like artefacts, not of my grandmother’s reading, but of her thinking – fragments of a becoming, of someone else’s inner world, left behind without a need for resolution. I have come to think of bookmarks as a kind of ruin. Not in their decay, but in their function as remains. Just as ruins do not ask to be restored, bookmarks do not seek to be resolved. I begin writing on them with one idea in mind, and end with a sentence that belongs to a different thought entirely. They are not annotations; they are intrusions. They disrupt the text. They refuse containment. Sometimes, to write on a bookmark is to admit the insufficiency of the book. Not in the sense that the book lacks something, but in that it cannot contain the whole of what it stirs. Reading spills. It flows into the body. It leaves stains. The bookmark is the place where all that becomes legible for a brief moment in time. A condensation. A pressure. A whisper. A touch. The place where thought retreats from the clarity of the page and moves into something cloudier, more intimate.

It rarely happens that what I write on bookmarks ends up in my work. Sometimes, when I return to them, I no longer recognise not just the handwriting, but the person who wrote it. The handwriting is mine, albeit slightly illegible; the hand that wrote it was my hand, but the urgency has passed. A word underlined with such intensity that I can still feel the pressure of the hand, still, a word belonging to the bookmark alone. There are exceptions. A question without a question mark. A phrase rewritten three times, growing more unstable with each repetition. Fragments that seep through from the faded urgency of the bookmark into the never-ending urgency of the text to come. Bookmarks are not signs of a reading self, but of a self undone by reading. They mark not knowledge, but rupture.

As I return to my bookmarks now, I realise that I am yet again standing at the threshold of the unfinished. That I am holding in my hands, again for a mere moment, the fragile weight of the trace. That I am listening to a murmur that begins where language refuses to carry and be carried. The bookmark is not a placeholder, but a place. A tiny landscape of thought, etched with the echo of something ungraspable. The bookmark is what remains when reading becomes an encounter – with the self, yes, but at the same time, with the impossibility of the self. To write on a bookmark is to write in the absence of certainty. It is to speak with a voice that is not fully one’s own. It is to become porous, to be written through.