My stolen books still bring me shame

There was a good 12 months as a teenager where I went through a stage of being an incorrigible shoplifter, and I'm still deeply ashamed about it. I never got caught, although I came fucking close a couple of times.  I would only ever steal comic books because they cost so fucking much, and I was desperate for a four-colour fix. 

I still know each and every one I didn't pay for, and I notice them when I see them today, buried in the last box of Marvel I still have. They might look like any other issue of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe '89 Edition, but their pages are stained with guilt I can still see, as my obsession with comics outpaced the extremely limited funds I had as a 15-year-old.

They burn in my collection, the ones I've held onto. The things I took without permission, when I was so young and so dumb, I still see them today, and know I don't deserve to have them.

The poor fucking shopkeepers who were just trying to earn a living. Most of them are gone now, eaten up by big chain bookstores, which were eaten up by nothing. While they were still there, I always went back to the stores I stole stuff from, years later, and bought anything I could from them, and I paid them back for my young thievery many times over.

There are still some books - and a couple of toys - in this house where I'm typing this that are expressly not mine, borrowed many years ago and picked up from small libraries and never returned. The actual owners obviously deserve to get them back, and even though I always remember who they actually belong to, I haven't seen some of those people in decades.

Some of them have been on my bookshelf for more than 20 years, are they mine now? Were they ever?

I gave them a good home, at least. Entire generations are growing up happy in the knowledge that they don't really own anything, because when they buy movies that can be instantly deleted from personal digital libraries, but I still have a lot of shit to call mine. I'm just shamed by how I acquired some of it.

Shame is very underrated in 2023 - I remain constantly distraught at the number of people who will lie and cheat and screw people over, and then just roll away like it ain't nothing. CEOs making hundreds of millions of dollars and lecturing us all about tightening their belts, public figures making public statements they know are barefaced lies, and then just going on with their lives like it ain't no thing. Endless corruption and grift.

All that going on in he world, I can't even steal a book, without feeling like a total shit for fucking decades. I just still feel bad about it. You'd have to be totally shameless not to.