The Book Nook

30

 I stood face to face with the black hole, pushing the candlelit jar till it almost touched the edge of the dark void. It still did not even look real, even right up close. But it was real; I could see it yet not quite see it at the same time, like a three-dimensional drawing.

I glanced back at the boy, but he was no longer standing behind me. Gone, disappeared. I had two choices; one, to wander and find my way back to the party; or two, to see what lay beyond the hole.

I couldn't tell if the regular me would make this sort of decision, or that the present me was under extraordinarily different circumstances, and so would be led to make divergent choices. It was late, I was tired, but I was also intrigued as to what it all meant. What would I find on the other side? A different reality? Would I receive answers, or yet more questions?

I decided down is where I would go. Holding the candlelight jar, I moved into the book nook and, leg extended first, I moved myself through the open space and into the blackness, feeling like I was only moving from one room into the next.

*

I awoke to distant light filtering in through the tall windows although none of it reached me where I lay in the corner, tangled in limbs in the crook inside the wall. Enough light reached at just the right angle so that it was like having heavy blinds on the sole window of your bedroom, but the blinds couldn't quite prevent the sunlight managing to eke though around the edges.

Tangled in limbs, I realized, did not account for just my own. I was not alone in the comfort of the cushioned reading nook. My knees and one arm were sore and it felt like it couldn't have been very long ago when I had fallen asleep. My head seemed too heavy to lift and before I could wonder why I had woken up barely past dawn, the answer stared down at me. A girl, by the look of the length of her hair, stood silhouetted - either from the sunlight protruding from the big windows behind, or because my eyes were fogged with sleep.

"Come on, let's go," the girl's soft voice whispered like from a dream I couldn't tell I was still in or not.

That voice was not Alexandria's, because she was compacted between me and the wall of books inside the nook. Her legs bent and hooked around my own, her hair rubbing against my cheek when I moved to look at who was above us. Were we caught? Was the jig up? Will the both of us receive lifetime bans from the library?

I also had no idea how I had gotten there. I remembered the party in the middle of the library, but getting to here from there seemed hazy. In fact; I didn't remember the party ending at all, nor of leaving. From what my memory could recall, the night hadn't ended. It just somehow faded into this morning.

It seemed absurd to me, this specific moment in time. I was in a state that most hopeless-romantic young men dream of. Lying next to a beautiful girl, having just spent the night in a library of all places. There it is, folks; I've became the envy of every heterosexual male in quite probably the world. This was the peak of it all, I was sure.

But yet, I couldn't shake a particular feeling. A feeling of something ending just as fast as it started. Not because of the girl whose voice was gently coaxing us out of hiding - likely so we wouldn't receive any complaints from appalled patrons. But ending ending. You know. Like poof, the ride is over, time to exit the fairgrounds, the fun is closing down and moving on to another city.

You see, when good things happen to me, I reflexively infer that they were coincidental, or a happy accident, a roll of chance. Just serendipity. I have trouble believing that good things come to you when you put good out in to the world. This belief in karma always seemed a bit too vague and almost nonsensical. Besides, I had never went out of my way hardly once to put out such 'good' into my surroundings that I should be met with such a return as meeting a soulmate, or a perfect match as a blessing in reciprocation. Something to that scale of meeting your other half could be seen as a reward or gift, something deserved for having been looking so long and remaining true, virtuous. If that was ever the case, I hold no doubt against my deserving of such a payoff. I knew I could never deserve such fortune.