Beautiful Things

Her eyes grow heavy as the lights dim, and day becomes night. Alone, she walks down empty streets and abandoned boulevards. In search of a cup of coffee, a cigarette, a novel, a friend. She looks and looks. The darkness envelops her until the footsteps she leaves behind are nothing but black and concrete. 

    After some time, she arrives at a bookstore. One of those 24/7 places with interchangeable patrons who take turns during their long, winding shifts. All of them bibliophiles: lovers of books. The papered walls and inked tables make a fine home, one that resembles a cozy heaven. She opens the door and takes a step inside, immediately greeted by a kind smile. 

    "Taya! Nice to see you here," a middle-aged man with round spectacles and ruffled hair says invitingly. 

He is organizing some books at the cashier, storing them away beneath the desk, leaving some on top—perhaps planning to read them later on. 

    "Good evening, Gustavo. Busy today?" 

    "Not for the most part, no. Thursdays are slow." 

    Taya takes a seat at a wooden table situated parallel to the cashier, placed in front of tall shelves consisting of philosophy and poetry texts. Thoreau, Camus, Bentham, Whitman, Frost, Plath. She stares at the blank, unmoving spines that seem to blend into a single giant formless being. One that towers over her with a slow yet sure breath of untainted knowledge. She stares and speaks. 

    "Right, right." 

    Gustavo finishes his batch of books, a stacked pile remains on the counter. He dusts off his hands and takes off his glasses, wiping them with a cloth withdrawn from the pocket of his jeans.

    "I've always liked working Thursdays though. There's a still silence that settles and makes this space its home. Kind of like the dewey morning after a stormy night, you know?" Gustavo raises his glasses as if he is making a point, and shrugs meekly. 

    "Yeah exactly, nothing like that Starbucks down the road." 

    Gustavo laughs in agreement. "Nothing like that Starbucks." 

    They remain in silence for a few short moments. She stays sitting at the table, still gazing upwards. A 22-year old student studying abroad for the semester. It is October and she is not homesick. If anything, she is content. A new place, with new faces and unfamiliar streets and stores that welcome her in like an old friend. But her heart still aches. An ache that cannot seem to be satisfied, no matter how much distance she places between her and the problems that she had left behind. 

    "You can't get away from yourself by moving one place to another," Ernest Hemingway once wrote. Taya believes he is right but has yet to accept its application to her reality, Perhaps the realization will come soon, she thinks. There must be a reason for all of this. 

    But much like Hemingway's stubborn nature as a writer and straightforwardness as a man, perhaps there was is deeper meaning. Maybe a problem is just a problem and a sudden move to Europe is just another desperate attempt in a long line of desperate attempts. 

If only you could leave behind memories at the place where you made them, Taya ponders. Pick them like a flower from the field of our brain and leave them on a tombstone, in a cemetery: a place where things once lived and have since then, died. Yet it's impossible. We'll carry these things with us to the day our hearts stop beating and our bodies rot into nothing but bone and an empty vessel of what was. 

    "Are you thinking again?"

    Gustavo breaks the reflective silence with the gentle firmness of his baritone voice, like a shot of sunlight that wedges through an opening of curtains and lands on the eyelids of someone who is asleep.

    "I'm always thinking.." Taya scoffs, trying to play it off. 

    "Maybe you should go and pick something to read. I'll make you some coffee." There is a tone of kindness underneath the layers of his words, and she recognizes this. 

    "It's almost midnight." 

    "Were you planning on sleeping anytime soon?" 

    Taya stifles a small laugh. This brief moment of joy comes and passes quickly, the lights reflecting against the wood shine a bit brighter than they did just a second ago. She stands and makes her way to the back; towards the fiction section. There are more modest shelves, just a few inches shorter than Taya. Her chin grazes their oaken top and she must duck under to see the titles of the novels that blend in with the cover's colour. Most of them are faded, as if each year of their existence has slowly peeled some of the life draped over the enclosed text. Rosy red turns pale as it withers and ages, a once bright blue book has now become wispy clouds of grey mixing with a November sky. Their colours are dimmed but a glow remains, one that is endearing and pulses within each book's spine: as if they are breathing in and out, in and out. 

tbc