A history student is tasked with sorting through an abandoned asylum's archives. The asylum is rumored to be haunted, but Lena dismisses this as merely town folklore. When her research brings her to venture inside the asylum's walls, however, the fr...
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My stomach isn't feeling right today (understatement), but I part all those thoughts aside like a veil until I see my sister again. I'll pick her up afterschool. I want her with me - some kind of anchor for the storm I know I'll fall into if I give one credence of thought to what I've just seen.
Whenever I kill time downtown, I have a particular route. There are two coffee shops I visit at each end of Main Street, giving me a compass point to walk toward. One to start the trip and one to end it. I start up by the retail stores and cafe's that turn more and more to restaurants the closer you get to the shore. My eyes are hungry for details, but none of them interest me much once I find them. I'll look in the windows of expensive dress-shops, or along the aisles of my favourite stationary store where they have these ultra-thin imported pens you can't find anywhere else. But the absurdity of what I've just seen is everywhere; it's gleaming off the faces of all the passerby's staring their noses down the snow. It's in between all the shirts on the clothes-racks. It's at the bottom of my mug.
I spin my way into the courtyard, and find the place between two bricks where I placed a dime about 8 years ago. I really don't know why; a way of marking my spot, maybe. A way of saying I was here. If I had the guts to graffiti, I bet I'd do it. I'd write Lena was here across every brick and, between the letters, would whisper remember me. But the dime isn't here; and that depresses me more than anything.
My mom dings my phone asking if I'll meet her for lunch in 15. Her office is near downtown, and we'll probably go to that brunch place near the town square we always go to.
I slip into the bookshop beside it, the one nestled in beside an old carriage archway. Its sign is placed as a big white rectangle on top of old, fading stenciled letters. It used to be a barber shop, you can make it out from the edges that peek out. Layers, layers, layers; this city, time, is nothing but layers; and bookshops have always been a safe-haven for me. Every time life has felt too small or too closing-in, I go to the bookshop. Even if I don't buy anything, I face all the books on the shelves like windows that will take me somewhere else. Windows to other lives. Expanding my own when I look out of them. I'll read the back cover and flip through the pages to get a feel of the author's writing, and usually that's enough to calm my mind. Whenever I step outside my own life and into another - and books really are like walking into another - I can leave my worries at their doorstep and when I pick them back up again they feel a bit lighter.
Not today. The faces of these books stare back at me with a hint of accusation. They're towering. They remind me of things I should be writing, and things I'll never write; and they're just reminders again and again of how inadequate I am - how much more inadequate I grow every single day I haven't done a damn thing in. What would it mean to do something? a therapist tried to ask me, but I couldn't answer it. It's elusive - and I think its elusiveness is what breeds its fear. I can't put it in a box, on a shelf; it's at the other end of all my veins, just pulsing there. I can't sift through it and tidy it up. I can't grab it at all.
