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There is a particular kind of loneliness that only exists in a rented room at 2 AM. It is not the sad kind. It is the hollow, waiting kind. The kind where the walls breathe and the ceiling fan ticks like a countdown to nothing.

Last night, I found myself in that space again. My TBR pile had shrunk to three sad, unread paperbacks (a betrayal to my title as Ratu Buku, I know). I had finished the last good one—a dog-eared copy of a 1987 Murakami—two hours prior. I was restless.

I am the Ratu because a stupid, stained, second-hand romance novel at 2 AM can still make me believe in the letter 'A'.

I closed the book. The rain outside my window decided to become a storm. The hollow, waiting loneliness in my room? It evaporated. ratu buku blogspot

I pulled out a book with no jacket. The cover was a sickly beige, the spine cracked like old skin. It was a romance novel from 1992. The kind with a shirtless man holding a woman whose dress was defying gravity. I don’t read romance. I am a Ratu of literary fiction and sad poetry.

By page 47, the duke had just confessed that he couldn’t read. Not a word. He had been faking it his whole life, memorizing menus and street signs like a secret code. The baker (wheat-hair) caught him staring at a letter from his dead mother.

But there was a stain on page 47.

I am keeping the box. And I am buying a red wine later. Just to make a new stain for the next girl.

Tonight, I was desperate enough to dig through it.

I started reading.

Not a coffee stain. It was a rusty, dried circle. A tear drop? A wine spill from a heartbroken reader before me?

That rusty stain on page 47? It landed right on the sentence: “He traced the letter ‘A’ on her palm, and for the first time, the world did not feel like a locked door.”

The Stain That Stayed Date: Sometime in the rain season Status: Draft There is a particular kind of loneliness that

It was terrible. The prose was sticky with words like "throbbing" and "majesty." The hero was a duke who built ships. The heroine was a baker with "hair like a wheat field."

Under my bed, layered in dust and broken dreams of a tidy life, is a cardboard box labeled "Donation." It has sat there for three years. Inside are the books I claimed to hate. The ex-boyfriend’s philosophy tomes. The cookbooks for diets I never started. The novel everyone loved but made me yawn.