dog-earred

I heard something about chapter books. They said that chapter books were a whole different ball game than books you could read in one go. Chapter books require you to dog-ear the page, (or use a book mark, for all the book-nazis out there) and promise to come back later. This was supposed to relate to people.
So I guess some people you can finish in one go. They are there for a day, or an hour, or a minute and then..........                ............
There are some people that you dog-ear, though. They promise to come back, you promise to come back. Like family, of course. Family sticks around and they usually crop up at least once in every chapter, if not more often than that, until the end of The Book. Friends stick around too, for a couple of chapters, usually. Sometimes it's for a 5-chapter block, or they just trickle in and out every 20 pages or so, and you're never quite sure when they might crop up again, and how they might be different.
Then there's the cameo appearances. The summer flings, the winter romance that ended with Christmas. They're the equivalent of the attractive guy you dated for a few months, and apparently served some sort of purpose in your life's story, but you're not sure why, because you never see him again after the first book in the series.
I think that's where this metaphor diverges from real life. Usually in the tangible world, the people you don't expect to ever see again, you see randomly, suddenly, and usually uncomfortably. The people that you expect to see again at Thanksgiving or at Friday's History Lecture are no-shows..... permanently. See, in chapter books, when a character is gone, they're gone! The cameo-appearances stay cameo. In chapter books, the protagonist sticks around, and you can count on the archetype of that wise old man to hold true. If you go back and look at your diary or whatever, it's pretty clear that's not how it works in life. The one-time people keep showing up, turning into two-and-three-time people, leaving you wondering if it's every truly possible to "never see someone again".  Sometimes the mentor figure isn't there, or they have to leave prematurely, leaving you wondering if there is such thing as consistency and dependability.
So really, chapter books are a risky business. Dog-earring a page is placing your trust and your heart on a line of text. There's the promise to come back, but that doesn't guarantee anything.

Why then, do we dog-ear the page?