While I was in America last Christmas, I bought a few books to bring back to Paris. One of the books I came back with is The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. On the title page, inscribed in pencil, is the message “you’re a beautiful person.” According to the price tag, this book was sold to the bookstore in January of 2002. The price was set at four dollars and ninety-eight cents. They were having a sale, so I paid half of that plus eight percent sales tax. Two dollars and sixty-nine cents. That’s the going rate for this book that someone offered another person as a gift. Less than three dollars for the paper on which someone expressed belief in the beauty of another.

The sentence is scrawled by a hand that looks either sloppy or hurried. The t is not crossed, and there is no period. It’s hard to say if the words are genuine or not; I am not a graphologist. The sentence is one that borders on the cliché, which is to say that it means either the world or nothing at all. Maybe the dedication was written out of obligation. But this seems unlikely, because there is no mention of Valentine’s Day, Christmas or a birthday, and there is no apology. So it seems safe to assume that this book was a gratuitous gift and its dedication sincere.

The book is obviously not new – the corners are a bit bent and there are a few scratches on the cover, but it doesn’t really look like it’s been read. I suppose it’s possible that the recipient of this book reads the same way that I do: keeping the covers tightly together so the spine is never broken and so the words escape the page like a secret, whispered to a single spying eye. This could explain the reason why the book appears unread, but it doesn’t explain why the book was sold to a secondhand bookstore.

Thinking about selling a gift to a used bookstore reminds me of this television show that my parents used to watch. I don’t remember what it was called, but I think the word antique was in the title. In any case, the idea was that people would come on the show and bring old things like figurines or furniture or anything else that they might think could be worth something or that they wanted to know more about. There was always at least one expert on the show who would explain what the object was, how old it was, and how much it was worth. Sometimes a man would discover that the chair he got at a yard sale was actually two hundred years old and worth thousands of dollars. Other times, people would find out that a cherished heirloom that had been passed down from generation to generation was nothing more than common clutter with no monetary value at all. At the end of each appraisal, the guests would be asked if they were interested in selling their item, and then at the end of the show, the host would open the phone lines and offer to sell the items shown to the highest bidders. I can understand selling a piece of furniture that was found at a garage sale and turned out to be worth a lot of money, but what I could never comprehend were the people who agreed to sell knowing that the piece of jewelry passed down by their mother and their mother’s mother was in fact worth approximately thirteen dollars. Why would one sell something that obviously has some emotional value for less than the price of an oil change?

Now it’s entirely possible that the person who received this book died unexpectedly, or maybe there was a financial crisis that meant that every penny counted and all but the necessities had to be sold. More likely, however, is the scenario in which the inscription’s writer ceased, at one point or another, to be important to the person who received the book. Maybe they were friends in college, and after graduation they drifted further and further apart. Maybe it was a passionate affair, and at its bitter end the jilted party discarded or sold everything connected to the unrequiting lover. Maybe, for one reason or another, the book was never actually given. Or maybe the gift giver’s feelings were never mutual, and the book was exchanged the next semester for credit towards a textbook on behavioral psychology. Whatever the reason may be, someone’s gift and proclamation of beauty was transformed into a sale for two dollars and sixty-nine cents.

I guess this happens to all of us at one point or another in our lives. I’ve stopped carrying her picture in my wallet. I’m no longer sure where that hand made teakettle is. I haven’t read that love letter in years. What day was her birthday on again? And I’m sure the same thing can be said about my gifts, and my photographs, and my letters. More often than not, caresses turn into embarrassed silences, or seething rancor, or total indifference, because in the end, and no matter how much we want them to be, kisses are not contracts. But despite this, I think it’s important to keep giving presents, even if they get resold for under three dollars and to keep sending love letters even if they end up in the trash bin or boxed up in the attic, because I like to think that the most important part of a gesture is its beginning and not its end. That is to say that the important thing is not whatever happened to that hideous silver plated pendant in the shape of a horse, but rather the fact that when I was fourteen, I was hopelessly in love with a brown-eyed girl named Candice.