The Book Nook

7

 It's not the first time she has left at night to walk around the block. Most often she goes out on her own while I'm asleep, returning before I've even awoken. She is always sure to leave a note, usually taped to the desk lamp beside the bed so I'd see it, often saying something like "Gone to walk amongst the midnight mist and give company to the spirits as they glide along through the loneliest hours of the night."

I know where she goes when she does. The same route around the block, starting off to the east two blocks and then down and around before heading through a small park, returning once again to our building where she arrives up the back stairs. In the dark of night she prefers familiarity. The same path, the same surroundings. I grabbed a jacket heading out and followed the route of hers she has travelled down on so many nights.

I return back to the apartment without seeing her nor any other soul. I was silent too, slinking along in case she didn't wish to be seen or heard. But nobody was traveling her late night trajectory on this particular nightfall.

It's late now. I sit, exhausted on my bed and on my back, spread out like a starfish, staring up at the ceiling. Alexandria is gone. She is playing a game, surely I hope, and I am stumped. I wrack my brain unendingly - should I have been prepared for something like this?

I am not a great thinker at this hour of the night and my mind feels muddled and spinning. If I return to sleep, will I find everything back to normal in the morning?

I'm shaking like Alexandria when she wakes from a horrible dream. But this is no dream. It is a wonder that I can even hold my arm out straight. In that case, I try it. I hold my arm out in front of me as if reaching for somebody standing at the foot of the bed. It wobbles like it would had I been holding a ten pound weight above my head.

Poring over every last thing from earlier in the night and then throughout the day, I cannot come up with any reasoning for this sudden disappearance. Was it pre-calculated? Or was it random?

I decide I need to get my thoughts in order so I can see them physically in front of me. With the level of exhaustion I am having, it will do no good if I only continue lying here. Time will pass, reality stretching further and further away from me. Inaction could lose me everything. I needed to think.

I go in to Alexandria's office and clear some space off of the whiteboard on the wall opposite where the desk sits. Half the wall is corkboard for thumbtacks, the other half whiteboard with erasable markers lying scattered on the desk. The corkboard is crammed full of tacked up documents, scribblings on paper of every kind - post-it notes, cue cards. The other board is covered by Alexandria's scrawling notes, the workings-out of what it is she was trying to develop. It is almost unintelligible, I could not decipher it if I tried.

As far as I could see at that moment, there were a number of possibilities of either where Alexandria could be, or places that could eventually lead me to her. Alexandria had not simply disappeared or ran off. She did not suddenly decide to catch a late flight to California nor take a taxi to a hotel where she was having an affair. This isn't that kind of story. There's reason to her madness; order amongst the chaos, and perception to the disorder.

She left me a note, after all.

What hits me right at this moment however, is the fact that I know nothing of what will happen next. It has completely changed and upturned the narrative of my story. Up to where my memories of The Book Nook begin, my life as I've always known it had been safe, sensible, low-risk. Even after Alexandria had come into it, while upping the level of unpredictability and spontaneity to it, I still, mostly, was in control of it. I maintained my personal level of status quo before her and I was happy with it. Up until Alexandria, I was perfectly content with the manner in which I drifted through life, even though it amounted to little personal risk.