The Library Book Was Mine, Returned by a Stranger

I lose books. I read on buses and trains and leave them behind constantly, a slow haemorrhage of paperbacks into the transit systems of the world. Years ago I lost a particular novel — a battered green Penguin, a favourite, read to softness — on a bus in my home town, and I mourned it mildly and bought another copy and forgot about it, as you do.

Last month, in a charity shop in a city three hours and two counties from home, killing time before a meeting, I bought a used paperback off the shelf for a few coins. Same novel. Not the same edition I'd replaced mine with — the old green Penguin, the exact battered edition I'd lost years before, worn to the same softness. I felt a small pang of nostalgia and bought it for that alone.

On the train home I opened it and something fell out from between the pages, tucked in near the back where I'd apparently stopped reading. A bus ticket. Not a bookmark bus ticket, some stranger's. My bus ticket. My home town's transit company, the old livery they stopped using years ago, the specific route — my route, the one I took to work — and the date, printed faint but legible, from the very week I lost that book, on that bus, in that town, three counties and several years away from the charity-shop shelf where it had somehow surfaced.