Pearse Station

It wouldn’t be the first time in recent weeks that I felt my eyes had been deceived. On some of the previous occasions, I’d been proven wrong, but on the ones that really mattered I was embarrassingly right. I would wake up the next morning not wanting to open my eyes and expose them to the light’s tricks, but then I’d remember that my mind projects worse tricks onto the back of them. This time, I’ll be amused if I saw what I think I saw, but I won’t have to clutch my stomach like it’s falling if I didn’t.

The station is busy at this time of day. Whoever placed an upright piano behind the barriers was playing a cruel joke on the sizeable captive audience that accumulates in the interval between trains, when pigeons can swoop down from the rafters to witness our unrest from their trench between the platforms. Not many people stop in the small space between the top of the stairs and the front of the barriers. It dresses itself as a meeting place, but just doesn’t manage to feel like one. The escalator feeds it with a stream of tired workers, students and shoppers, but they’re all caught in a current that keeps getting stronger until they find themselves washed through the front door of their homes. I’ve managed to escape from that current. I caught my hand just as it reached for my ticket, because there’s nothing better to see at home and I can’t lift the weight of any more uncertainty. 

When I arrived, no one was on the escalator. For a few seconds, the electric light seemed to dim into a muddier shade of yellow and the piano tinkling from above became muted. I heard one last tone of the gate opening to let someone through, then its usually incessant beeping stopped. As I looked up and watched the pulsing metal steps collapse and disappear, the draught coming from the entrance seemed to warm slightly and steady itself to match their mechanical pace. Then, what curiosity the breeze had to brush my cheek dissipated and if it still blew, I was left in the relief of hypnosis to wonder where and why. I indulged a clouded vision of how the steps might look if they could change direction on the same unpredictable whim that the wind takes, but I was soon torn from it by something unsettlingly close to that picture. They slowed abruptly to a sluggish pace, which would have sent my eyes reeling if a pigeon hadn’t done it by skimming across my shoulder at the same time. By the time I looked back, I was doubting myself already. 

I once thought that the leaves had stopped falling for a week in autumn. It felt like there was nothing the weather could do to induce that season to pass. Every time I walked under that grandiose canopy on the north edge of Stephen’s Green, a different line of people were posing for photographs under the same precariously hanging flakes of gold and amber, as if the trees had turned to stone. I was certain that not a single leaf had fluttered down to the pavement where they might be swept away; and yet the piles appeared, and whether or not I had felt it move, the year arrived at the heart of winter and the branches appeared as if they had always been bare. I wished with all of the heat left in my struggling limbs that in that one, hopeless fantasy, my perception had been proven master of its household. 

If I’m mistaken today, at least this attempt to slow time wasn’t as ambitious. The lurch back into reality won’t be as violent. It already seems likely, because the dimming of my senses was an invention. I can still remember it, but those parts are only there to decorate the memory. The lull in people using the escalator was rare, but that part was real. The wind, too, was real, but I’ve fabricated its synchronisation with the steps. It just remains to be seen whether their surprising change in speed actually happened. When I stepped onto it, I thought I felt it start to move faster. It must have a sensor that causes it to slow when it’s not in use. Someone came running to catch a train whose doors were already open on the platform, though, and the usual stream of people has continued ever since. 

If every part of memory was real, it would be impossible to tell whose past we were remembering. Its story would have no flawed human protagonist and we would know nothing about ourselves. That’s why O’Connell Bridge appears long enough to cross the Vale of Glendalough on the night when I rambled across it in a lamplit mist, listening to two light sets of footsteps and one melodic voice. On the day when I sprinted across it as if I could have simply leapt over the river, it appears in name only, like a shout from the past. Even if I know its true length, I can’t say I’ve ever seen it. Similarly, the procession of undated afternoons between one school year and the next spreads its grass cuttings and pangs of free-floating anticipation so far out of its place that I might as well still be on holidays. I could have been idle for a week or a year, depending from what angle I recall it, but I can be sure that the sun didn’t burn with the ferocious consistency that memory insists it had. It doesn’t matter how much sunshine or boredom I endured as a child, but sometimes one of these decorative inventions can be mistaken for a core component of the past. That’s when our eyes’ little deceptions start to hurt. 

There’s bound to be another pause in the flow of heads appearing over the top of the escalator. If I’m lucky, I might even miss a train before that happens. If I’m luckier, it may not happen at all. Then, I’ll get to suffer all night from such a trivial version of uncertainty. I’ve seen a lot of escalators in my life. I’ve seen their metal teeth chew and spit out thousands of bodies from London’s underground digestive system; I’ve seen them broken down and felt dizzy when my feet insisted that they were still moving, the same way my eyes insisted that a dead friend’s chest was still rising and falling; before I was even the height of their handrails, I froze at their edge, scared that I’d fall on the first step and be eaten by the last. I’ve dreamt about them too, but even in those dreams, I’ve never seen one that changed its speed. If it turns out that this one really did, I’ll never be able to walk past another one without watching to see if it happens. 

They’re a boring kind of object, not worth thinking about for any longer than it takes to use them. That’s what makes them the perfect character in a city’s cast of materials to find that I didn’t quite understand. If I hadn’t set aside this time to let an escalator’s movements sink into my awareness, I might have found myself interrogating an idea whose collapse would send shockwaves through me. I could have been leaning against the door in a busy carriage, looked into the pool of faces I was trapped with and seen my reflection among them. I could even have reviewed one of the treacherous, unscripted conversations that I fell into during the day, which can only damage my faltering nerves. Some illusions are vital to maintain, but I’ll be safe for as long as I’m anchored to one that only matters as much as it suits me to believe. The longer this parade of faces keeps me transfixed, the easier it will be to hold faith in the next illusion that comes along.

However complex its variations might be, they’re each wearing a full day of human experience on their face. That adds up to a relatively uniform veneer of mild exasperation. They look neither defeated nor encouraged, neither dejected nor enamoured by their myriad solutions to the riddle of another day alive. I don’t see any of them for long enough to stop their features from blending together, so the same blank face keeps appearing like dolls moving across a factory line. I can only hope that if a familiar face appears and stops my mind from wandering, I’ll have enough time to reassure myself that it wasn’t really that person. Some people’s voices and smiles materialise before me everywhere I go, but it’s never them. As the haze of commuters continues to drift past with no sign of stopping, I’m watching the traces of this morning that I took away with me after ten minutes spent sitting among the park’s sleepy stirrings. Very few people walk through it at that hour. Just like here, none of them stop. Seagulls floated around the inside of our shared bubble more peacefully than anyone would believe during the bustle of afternoon, chatting mournfully to each other from every corner. Even there, I was torn from my abstracted rumination because I thought I saw someone I knew. The moment I realised I was mistaken, one of the less tranquil gulls’ hysterical bursts of laughter echoed from just outside the gates. 

It feels like the same disarming smile is going to rise into the picture with every step that cycles its way back up to me. If I could rely on memory to show me what risks that entailed, I’d say I’ll be immobilised. On the days when luck granted my eyes the pleasure not to be deceived by that flood of light, I must not have needed to retain an impression of what continent my limbs were on, because they’re nowhere to be found among the glimmering warmth in the disembodied eyes beaming back at me. That can’t actually be how it felt at the time, of course, but for as long as I remain transfixed by the harmless matter of escalators, none of that will matter. Maybe the entire station will dissipate into a pink-edged sunset cloud if my name is incanted by the right pair of lips. All I can distinctly hear is a child bashing piano keys, though, so I’m free to venture further into my past and indulge more of its comfortable uncertainties. 

A day I spent in the mountains hovers in and out of focus around the river of bodies pouring onto the platform. Whatever really happened on that day, happened more years ago than I can admit to myself, but an appropriately distorted form of it is still here to comfort me with its benign fabrications. I can hear the drone of fist-sized bees struggling to move their intolerable burdens of pleasure through a sprawling maze of gorse flowers. It’s too closely blended with the escalator’s mechanical hum for me to commit to being in either place. All I know is that I’m waiting, in the midst of unknown things. The sun is always an immense presence, but on my day in the mountains it occupies a greater space than all the other named objects that memory could list. I can’t see it, but it weighs protectively on every tingling fold of my skin. In the park this morning, it was more subdued, but all of its intensity was latent in a varnished glow that draped the clouds. In the station, now, it’s as it has been every time my eyes were deceived and every time I wrote a healing twist into the story of that injury.

Future events can appear no different to a memory. Because they’re more susceptible to the influence of reason, sometimes they’re even more accurate. To my daily horror, though, their deceptions are no less sharp a knife than those of the past. When it comes to an hour whose probable courses I’ve exhausted in the theatre of daydreams, and something I didn’t predict still manages to filter in, knowingly glaring at me through the fog of chance, I always long to shut my eyes and run away. Despite my best attempts to release my thoughts into the park’s wash of mottled green and birdsong this morning, they were wishfully carried away. I dreamt myself onto the brink of disappointment. I’m not the only person perpetually haunted by absences; every one of the grieving hearts beating their way past me is, too. Just as we modify the past by by suffusing it with the present, all we can do in our ignorance of the future is clutter it with detritus from the past. My desire to run away is spread as evenly across time as that inescapable figure is across my desires. 

In the fantasy where Westland Row’s pavement stops feeding this disorienting rush, and only a trickle of strangers are left floating up the escalator, a lone face with the throes of a thousand others knitted into its brow approaches the top. The station’s artificial glow has turned to mud again, but it’s starting to crackle and flicker like firelight. Someone with nothing gentler waiting for them at home has stayed behind to take their shy comfort in the touch of piano keys. As I listen to their melodies’ muffled appeals, the new arrival steps off and trudges towards the barrier without looking at me. No one has stepped on behind him. My anticipation is worth no more than a smirk and a raised eyebrow, but there’s also a physical sweep of relief as it dislodges every other concern from my attention. A current of warm air catches my lip and then, as clearly as a dream could ever paint it, I see what I thought I had seen. Steps and music both slow to a painstaking crawl. 

If I could choose what way my daydreams take me, that would be the end and I’d continue to await my pointless amusement. My brow doesn’t relax or my smirk widen into something more satisfied, though. I remain fixated on the creeping steps. I notice dirt trapped in the shadows between their trampled silver ridges and rattles in the straining mechanism hidden underneath them. I examine every minute detail from initials scratched into the rubber railings to the litter caught in cracks, but still can’t accept that I’ve seen what I was waiting for. Every time my eyes adjust their focus and a face doesn’t appear, my stomach drops a little further, until I’m hit with a cannonball of that dreaded nausea and my hands cling to my gut like it could spill and pollute the cloudy grey tiles. The flickering lights rapidly start to dim, and as they splutter their final prohibitions to my dilating pupils, I’m sure that I see the escalator come to a complete stop. 

One mocha-feathered pigeon is resting in the corner, staring through the crowd just shy of its unforgiving torrent. I’m not sure if she’s been there since I arrived, or whether she’s injured, but I’d have second guesses about what I saw if I walked past that rich brown shawl pecking by my ankles on the street. A few others have come and gone, colliding with commuters as they scavenge for crumbs, but this placid outsider is in a trance. Later, I might doubt if she’d been real. No matter how many times this escalator surprises me by finding new degrees of freedom, I still might doubt if that was real, too. With any mercy, I’ll doubt the sprinkling of rain that tickled my shoulders as I walked up Nassau Street and the little pink flower that peeked up at me from between blocks of granite. Let me be deceived by books that I’ve read, scents and waves that assailed me as I dragged my heels in hot sand, illnesses I fought and any amusing detail that carried me from one day to the next, as long as it withholds me from that one devastating strain of illusion. When those smiling eyes that haunt me glide into reach of mine, I need the enraptured figure they see to be as real as the name they sing into the vast uncertainty between us.

Dear Reader

I didn’t actually believe you were going to do it. I have to apologise, actually, because that was very unfair of me. All you have is your feelings, and all you have to display them on is your word. It just seemed like such an extreme length to go to, to give that word its natural authority. I thought that even if you were telling yourself you would, you only believed it in bad faith and would keep putting it off until you felt differently. If you’re carrying on for my sake, then I really didn’t deserve to be proven wrong. I don’t understand why you would, but I’m eternally grateful for it. All I can do now is promise that it’s going to get better.

I want this to be the most pleasant and rewarding experience for you, but it probably won’t be. To be honest, I hoped you wouldn’t do it. You have much better places to bring your feelings, your desires and your precious minutes. You’re here, though, so all I can do is keep reaching out to you. It might change you in some small, even negligible way. I’ll be embarrassed if it doesn’t, because it’s a matter of basic human decency. You could have given anyone this chance to make an impact, but you gave it to me. All I ask is that you forgive me for doubting your curiosity.

I’m nervous to find out why you’ve made the right decision to keep going, because now that you’re here, I have to invent it. More accurately, I have to find out what I invented, because it wouldn’t be here for you to read if I hadn’t done it already. It might not have mattered what I wrote, but in my ignorance I never would have guessed that you would actually read it. Now it matters greatly, but I’m still looking at your feelings from a distance as if I didn’t know what to do with them.

Let’s have a closer look. You’re doing the best you can. That’s to say, the best thing you could reasonably be doing, because that’s what we always do. When my alarm made its pointless noises at me this morning, I dragged myself out of bed because I stood to gain more that way. When a day has nothing to offer, I switch off the alarm and go back to sleep. To think that my noises might be worth dragging your eyes across a page for is truly humbling.

If something vital wasn’t missing, though, the best thing to do would be to wander off this trail of words and drift back into a space that can’t be shared. You would drop whatever you’re reading from and go cheerily limp; I would find that I’d written nothing, because there was nothing wrong for me to approximate teasingly, exacerbate unwittingly or ultimately fail to address. Since these words are all here, wrapping you in their most honest embrace even if it fails to connect, there has to be a shadowy corner among those elusive feelings of yours that’s shouting out for a fire to illuminate its hidden colours. 

I’ve never read anything that didn’t ignite even a brief healing spark in me. Just breathing in a human body is enough to inflict injuries that would render reading intolerable if it didn’t promise to heal. Tedious academic texts and heart-shredding letters of rejection were all in my best interest to battle through, but the most thrilling and suspenseful storylines also must have fought against me if I really sunk my tongue into their syllables. If your missing colours aren’t dazzling in the light of my words yet, there’s always hope: the effect can’t be immediate. First, we have to struggle through a maze that weaves in and out of meaning.

Whatever is concealed in that nook that you’re seeking the words to demystify, it only has one quality that I can be certain about: it’s as profound as your tireless little heart. That’s why this is really too great a responsibility for me. Anything that language will adhere to can be raised into profundity by the right choice of symbols. Being human, you must feel like you lack a validating description for countless bubbling springs of unease. All I need to do is elevate one of them into something you can take away and think proudly about. I must have done it already, since it’s here for you to read, but I just can’t imagine how one of those brow-softening pieces of you could attain its lustre on my account.

To level the ground between us, I have to admit that I didn’t believe I was going to do it, either. Not because I doubted that you deserve my best effort, but because I wanted your confidence to be misplaced. If I thought that even the most absent-minded gesture of your wilting fingers was within my powers of description, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to start spilling all these words onto you. When they contract passively towards your palm, then slightly flex as if you had imagined reaching for something before curling back into a sheltered bud, every crevice of me that your influence might reach shudders; in that twitch alone I see the script for all those reasons you give me to smile, but I can’t read it. All I can do is circle my own awe with misshapen stories and plead for you to keep reading.

Whether or not it would become the beacon of validation that I owe you, I should have known that my effort was inevitable. The incredible speck of you that it announces to the world has to be one that no prettier prose could access. You might not even notice it shining from you until it reflects off something else. A clean towel or the cold kiss of a pillow under your wrist could carry you unexpectedly over a wall of misery, and if I’ve really implored meaning to flood your feelings as urgently as it ought, my words and the morsel of you that they’ve captured would be woven decoratively into its fabric. Even if it’s just a flirtatious suggestion of elegant red hues that catches your eye as it fades from your coffee’s crema, or any other fleeting imposition of colour that enriches your day, the fire that you came here to light will have to reveal its glow somewhere.

I hope it turns out to be more than that, though, because I have no choice. I couldn’t have given this to you if it wasn’t meant to be a devastating revelation of your worth. I have to hope that it rattles the foundations of your being, because you could have found something that did, instead of reading this. I didn’t want to believe you would do it, because I owed you more than I could ever give. If reading this is the best thing that you could possibly be doing, then it falls into my hands to determine what’s possible for you. 

Having made a fumbling attempt to understand what to do with your feelings, all that’s left to discover is how a selfish act like writing is meant to handle such a delicate task. As with reading, I’ve never written anything that didn’t assume its final shape to heal me in some way. Without my own void of loss or injury to fill, I’d have no words to pour into this space and pass on to you. It’s an intimate, trusting exchange. When I write that I want this to be the most pleasant and rewarding experience for you, I mean that when I was the height of your navel I rocked abstractedly on a dewy clump of grass one star-flooded night and gazed upwards until I almost fell onto my back in disbelief. I mean that I’ve reaped that reward and watched it fade like the glittering constellations as the more pressing light of day spread into my life. By virtue of its existence, we’ve both recovered something profound here. It doesn’t really matter how, because soon we’ll find that all we had to do was keep going.

If there were anything more effective I could have done for you, I wouldn’t have wasted a second trying to mend my own wounds by stitching vacuous sentences together. I hope you won’t forget that, even if you never lose your unwarranted confidence in my capacity to extract meaning from the silence of sleepless nights, or those stuttered gaps in your thoughts. When you feel a chill that’s too deep for any verbal consolation to trickle down to, reading might only seal the crack where that unease is hidden. Maybe that will be the best thing you can do. If it is, I’ll have written something that conceals your pain from you as profoundly as your poetic smile hides it from everyone else. In every recess of me that your own fire casts into shadow, though, I hope it’s not.

I don’t believe you’re going to do it again. I wouldn’t think much of you if I did, because I think so much of the world that we’re decorating with stories together. With the most emphatic gratitude for your trust, I urge you to take your feelings to a stony beach and promise them to the hollow rattle under the wash. Take them to a restaurant and feed them something new. It’s been a pleasure to navigate our losses in this creative embrace, but I can hear gulls softly whining in the background and it makes me quake in my seat. Every time daylight spills over the horizon, it seeps into the cracks between the words we used yesterday. We try to use them again, to paint over those stubborn gaps with desire and soothing labels for our faults, but they keep dissolving. Next time we’re both missing something that doesn’t have a name, please know that the best thing you can do is hold me against your warm, feeling skin and listen to the flames we have crackle under the fainting stars.

Seven Pages

Being as obsessively careful as I am to keep my books in perfect condition, I’ve read half of this one without as much as a gentle curve lifting the cover, or even a hint of that thumbed yellowing that can run down the edge of the pages. These are problems I’ve often mustered the strength to overlook, but if by some unthinkable circumstance a crease were to appear in the spine, I would have to buy a new copy and start reading it again. Nothing like that has ever happened. If I thought that it was going to happen, I would choose never to read another book, rather than face the palpitations and scoldings of my inner critic. 

I open it on page two hundred and four, with no memory of what was happening or being described at the point where I stopped. It’s in the middle of a chapter. My bookmark is there, nestled into the crease, too replete with purpose to withstand my pinch. I examine it before looking at the page. A picture of a sleeping dog and a quote by a famous poet. It had been such an easy object to understand before I uncovered it and exposed its meaning to the ambiguity of those symbols. It simply was, then I injured it by looking; now it has to heal by trying to be something more than itself. This is the only kind of wound that I plan to inflict on my book, as I now turn to look at its enclosed universe of symbols.

I must have stopped reading in the middle of a paragraph. I remember subvocally riding the peaks and troughs of the words at the top of the page, but those in the middle are only superficially familiar. I start from the beginning of the second paragraph and follow their sounds along a short runway into unfamiliar territory. Before long, I’m stumbling across the fibres and phonemes of page two hundred and five. More often than not, I need to repeat at least part of a sentence before I’m sufficiently satisfied that I’ve internalised it to continue reading. Almost as often, that satisfaction can be quite complete long before I feel at ease to call it sufficient. Sometimes, I will pause on a single word and no matter how many times I repeat it, I cannot be induced to feel like I’ve imparted meaning to its tangle of lines and curves.

A singing electrical appliance battles for my attention, but it’s not the only contender. There’s a texture in the air whose material basis distractingly eludes me. If it contains the spaces where words would go, it’s not a voice, but if it has the mathematical luminosity of notes, it’s not music. The walls are too thin. I could be at the bottom of a cliff, pitting these words against the sea, and the walls would still be too thin. Someone I can’t see is making movements that spill into a space where they don’t belong. It’s almost as if they were scribbling on my pages; except, of course, that if they did that I would be utterly devastated. As it currently stands, I’m permissibly irritated and a pigeon’s distant cooing is pulling harder on the threads of my attention. 

Turning onto page two hundred and six is a rewarding experience. Of all my personal achievements, the few that came with greater satisfaction than turning a page still lacked the empowering promise of its consistency. I can’t remember if I’ve ever won a competition, but I think I know the feeling of it. It contains that elated appetite to become more of yourself that comes with turning a page, amplified proportionately to a broader perspective on the self whose becoming it entails. It must have been wonderful, if it ever happened to me, but could only have been so in order for my fingers to feel this dry scratch between them. The boundary between the texture and sound of paper is uncertain. They leak into each other in the same way as the meanings of words in a sentence.

Although the prospect of new ground is always exciting, the block of unread text that appears across two new pages overwhelms me at first. It’s the same effect as turning a corner or coming over the cusp of a hill. You look up from the path and a whole new section of the landscape appears before you. If the previous page has ended in the middle of a sentence, I usually need to turn back and retrace my steps because of the distraction. This only serves to prolong the satisfaction on my fingers and in my ears. I could happily endure the disorientation of navigating even the least rewarding book for longer than that of standing among an unreadable crowd.

I can also enjoy the movement of numbers across the corners of the page, which all have distinct personalities. It can take excessive handling of the paper to satisfy myself that I haven’t skipped a page, but once I’ve overruled my mind’s insistence that there’s a hidden one that I can’t access, I settle into the new combination of digits and it becomes a backdrop to what follows. Such a trivial detail is nonetheless a fundamental aspect of how we experience the written word. It’s a weather pattern that repeats its ritual between the covers of every object that we would call a book.

Continuing onto the unique terrain of page two hundred and seven, I find that the world has been irreversibly changed. An event, a concept, or an object has been described to me since I allotted my attention to the book. As the pigeon outside has continued to speak and sunlight has sharpened and blurred a line of shadow across the page with the passage of clouds, I’ve formed an understanding of it that shifts my perspective on the story where those things are happening. However imperceptible that shift may be, I can never return to a place where it hasn’t happened, no matter how successfully I forget the actual words that I’ve read. That’s why this little thing that I’m holding is so precious to me. That’s why they’re arranged on my shelves like the vital organs in a living body.

Two, zero, eight: in the digits of the next page, a pair sees itself cubed on the far side of a void. From this digressive observation, my mind loses its grip on my eyes and allows them to wander across the room’s clutter and colour. By the time I become conscious of this, I’ve been planning meals and replaying conversations for several minutes. I can still remember the last words from the previous page, but the sense of discontinuity is too uncomfortable, so I feel compelled as usual to retrace my steps. That texture in the air is becoming more viscous. Whatever the person on the other side of the wall is doing, they’re doing it more now. Where it resembles speech, it’s more distinctly musical. Where it resembles music, it’s more imposingly eloquent. It rolls through the air without a pause, punctuated by muffled thuds and mechanical shrieks. Against the current of these puzzling faces that the world keeps turning to me, I find my way back into the text. Inevitably, I sink into its cushion of prose and find that it’s by far the most comfortable place to be.

As I make my way smoothly down the lines of page two hundred and nine, consciously trying not to repeat any of them unnecessarily, I notice a tension in my throat and on my tongue. It’s as if I’m forcing my progress by reading aloud in every sense except physically enunciating the words. I’m standing at the very edge of speech to block it from interjecting any of its own concerns from outside. I’m still aware of the noise, and the air temperature is becoming abrasive despite not having changed, but I battle my way through happily until I turn to page two hundred and ten. It takes only one satisfyingly simple gesture, which my fingertips had instinctively prepared themselves to make. In an unlikely occurrence, I maintain my footing in the sentence and continue reading without having to turn back.

My hands are starting to cramp slightly from the excessively cautious way they’re cradling the book. I know that I could relax my grip without incurring any greater risk of dropping or bending it, but its appeal to my senses and its place among the external objects I’ve appropriated as bodily organs renders the pain more rewarding than its release. I keep a finger flat against the spine at all times to make sure it doesn’t crease; so that no injury the book might incur would escape my perception, as if it weren’t physically integrated with my nervous system, which its ideas and images are sculpting. Like a limb, I’m conscious of its position whether or not I’m looking at it. 

It can’t be overstated, of course, that a lot of things in life are more important. On summer evenings, the setting sun commands my attention by staging an opera in vast washes of fire across the edges of carefully drifting clouds; I watch it, absorbed in an awestruck sense of abstraction that never diminishes with time. Sometimes I might hold a guitar and mindlessly release a few slow progressions of chords into that space just to watch them get lost there, but not a word crosses my mind unless it’s spoken by one of the birds chattering outside. I’m not thinking about the book, because I’m too engaged with the world in which it’s set; but it can only be from the book that I’ve derived such value for that world, and by absolutely no means have I forgotten where it is.

My steady flow of comprehension doesn’t last long. On page two hundred and eleven, I struggle to lift meaning from each word and carry it across into the next. While I’m replaying the sound of a sentence for the third time without catching enough of its momentum to cross its full stop, the sound from next door comes to a rattling crescendo and then stops. Its absence initially feels like an addition to the crowded room. All of its dissipated pressure against my ears is still fresh enough in my mind that its features hang in the air like smoke, but the squeals, hums and rumblings that rose from beneath it are audible now too. I look up to let them flood into their new sensory niche. A shy trickle of water joins them from somewhere beneath a sweetly pontificating robin, whose voice seems to have pushed aside the less articulate pigeon’s. As I settle into this new field of sound, I start to notice other things, too. My stomach, or something around it, feels tense. I’m probably hungry. My legs hurt, so I shift my position, which sends a wave of something distinctly identifiable as hunger through me. I lower my eyes passively to the text. Any effort required to direct them doesn’t extend to focusing them. For the following minute, I’m staring at a grey smudge, but if anyone were to ask me what I was doing, I would say that I’m reading. It wouldn’t be dishonest, because during that minute, nothing other than the simple enjoyment of having that book in my hands could make me feel so safely tethered to the uncertain ground where spines crack and pages tear.

Reluctant to remove myself from that space having extracted a chain of words only seven pages long, I gather all of my strength into pulling something comprehensible from those dark stains on the paper. One more sentence rewards my efforts with its own tiny support under the weight of the churning world, but it’s not enough to carry me further. After feeling its syllables on my tongue and tying them into an approximate understanding, I pick up my bookmark and look at it again. The dog looks peaceful and familiar. It’s the kind of scene that makes me feel like I’m remembering it from a dream, or from some unremarkable day long ago. I must be tired, too. I tuck it far too carefully back into the crease and close my book. Despite all the noises that are swarming in the air, it’s as serene as I could reasonably hope for. My breath is slow, deep and automatic. It’s predictable, but to some ineffable discontent that settles in the space now void of written words, it’s the only thing that is. As I listen to something start to rattle again on the other side of the wall, I try to remember what happened on the pages I’ve just read. I can’t.

Rescue

I’m going to buy a book. I’ll probably read it, too, but not before I buy more of them. As greedily as I’ve been savouring its absence, knowing that it’s there to be made my own, it’s becoming too much of a distraction. Wanting it doesn’t add that shimmering hint of music to my voice any more. I hope not to speak much, if I can help it, but I’ll sing my way through a few daily platitudes when I have it at last. Even before I have it, the active intention to bring it home will make its absence sweet again. There’s nothing quite the same as rescuing a part of yourself from the shelves of a book shop. It just can’t be overstated how important it is to make sure you’re rescuing the right part. 

The shop where I store these extensions to the day’s assorted pleasures has almost as many shelves as I wish I had at home. Safe as the old stories that I carry in my head, they’re never shaken with noise or bleached under a lamp hotter than the one beside my bed. It’s a shelter for every smile my older face might wear. I know exactly where to find the book I’m looking for, but also that the path I indulge across the carpet is going to tread the twisting and looping line of someone who’s never seen a printed word before. I’ll be serenaded into a stupor by spines flashing their names and colours at me, because I can’t ignore the entire, breathing and grieving world that each one conceals. Detained in the din of all those screaming miracles, I’ll already be plotting to fill the next book-shaped gap in my memory.

I haven’t thought much about my purpose as I approach the shop along its busy street, whose crowds I would never trouble myself to navigate for a lesser cause. Apart from trying and sometimes failing not to collide with other pedestrians, I’m struggling to name the author of the book I’m currently reading. It’s a collection of poems with a central theme that I can see waving in the distance, but which I couldn’t even attempt to identify. Luckily, it’s identified in the blurb. Unluckily, it’s as abstract to me as the author’s name, so both slip out of my mind the second I’m not looking at them. It doesn’t matter, though, because it’s left a spellbinding trail of images that I could never forget. Like every other book, including the one I’m about to buy, it’s changing me in some irreversible cocktail of minor damages and repairs. 

There’s a new novel in the window, with intricate swirls of black and pink tempting my eye on the cover. I’m not exactly sure what I’m tempted to do, because it’s one that I’ll probably never read, but if I can hold it I might still extract some kind of meaning from the textures on its jacket. A flood of similar temptations delivers the dramatic greeting I was hoping for as soon as I step inside. I start to spin my way past a thousand paths that might take me somewhere brighter than the one I’ve chosen, but eventually land with my feet planted roughly in front of it and my hands bolstering their nerves to seek it out. No limb of mine is ever entirely confident of its place, but I’d never wish such a fate on them. We’re in this wonderful disaster together, spinning until all the tides and their babbling tongues fall still. In enough time for me to parse the title and reflect on the satisfied smile that I’ve already lifted from its neat and softly hued cover, ten copies have found their way into my careful grip. 

Some are easy to eliminate. One has a crease in the corner, another has a slight tear and, to my horror, one of them even has a crack all the way down the spine. One of the others is mine, but it will take careful examination to discover which. Although I would never risk making such a mark, there are small dents and crinkles that can go unnoticed until it’s too late to rule out the possibility that I did. I lift each one to enjoy its familiar features instinctively and with an invaluably quiet mind. It’s like a meditation, except instead of shedding my anxiety, I’m just holding it in an unstable form that I wouldn’t trade for anyone else’s peace. They all seem to hold a kind of whispered stripe that’s residual of the way they were printed, too subtle to be called an error and differently placed on every copy. It’s not enough to reject any of them yet, but as I pass them close to my eyes I discover smudges on some, a speck of dirt on one and a poorly placed price sticker on another. I’m left with two copies that I would be delighted to call my own, but only one of them is actually mine.

I’ve been here before. It’s not just a choice, because even if I’m free to determine which answer is right, there is still a right one. As far back as my sparse and shy memories can take me, I’ve found myself tripping over freedom. I was barely old enough to speak when a box of coloured pencils fought my unsteady hands and won. I can remember our old grey cat purring beside me on the floor, but not what kind of animal or smiling object I was colouring. Whatever it was, it had a feature over whose trivial shade creative licence came crashing into my life. I was so distraught by the demand from each of two pencils not to lift the other that I left my picture unfinished. I sat still and listened to the cat’s rolling reassurances, as if she would speak the answer if I waited for long enough. 

Since then, I’ve started to learn that there can be no answer if I don’t speak my own at every passing second. I’m not sure I’ll ever get bored enough to absorb the lesson fully, though. I could never read another book again if I had to admit to having so many answers. For today, it’s enough to celebrate the ubiquity of imperfection. Both of these books are gifted with it; all I have to do is wait here until I see which one is more aligned with me. I open one of them slightly and listen to the sounds of the first paragraph’s words. Their meaning stands to the side. I can see it, but all of my attention is given to shape and texture. I went through the same process when I bought the jacket that I’m wearing. It carries a protective fine detail of the person that I am, which I couldn’t fit onto my face or into the unpredictable wanderings of my speech, but I wasn’t yet wearing that detail when I tried it on in the shop. I’m not reading this book yet, but I’ll know if the words feel right.

This is the one. I don’t mean the only one, if past experience is anything to go by. Before I walk out, I’ll discover several other organs that I didn’t know my body needed to survive. This is the exact object I came here to cradle adoringly against my ribs, though. I’ll carry it through the rest of this anatomy lesson like it’s starting to stitch its fibres into my skin. I arrange the others neatly back on their shelf, ready to be rescued when their carers find that they’ve lost just a bit too much sleep without them. When I look around to assess the alphabetical maze of diverging worlds that I’ve traversed, all of its corners and colours carry a fresh veneer of the unfamiliar, which makes my thoughts dissipate into a cloud of the lost sounds I can pick from the room’s low-lying chatter. It feels bigger. There’s enough space to process not knowing what comes next. As I wait to recover a direction from anywhere in this warm bubble, where I would happily remain without one, my head sways sleepily under the gentle charm of desires that haven’t yet been given a name. These new eyes may get me blissfully lost on the way out. 

Mercifully, there can be no way out that doesn’t pause to reflect on the narrative thread that binds us, because there’s a queue to pay. I can feel it vibrating like a guitar string. Maybe I’m a loose page and no one else in the queue has invested enough of themselves into collecting books to share that feeling, but it suits my tuneful smile to believe they do. I can think of no outcome more harmful than being told that I didn’t have to pay. If every book under this roof was declared my own, I would still want them, but no amount of money could relieve me of that want. I’d jump from chapter to chapter, never soothing my hunger for long enough to sink into a dream built from their poetry and plots. Today, I’ll emerge into that afternoon bustle singing my surrender; swaddled in the propulsive myth that not enough is something you can still have. 

This new knot of words that I’ve claimed has a place, on some shelf or in one of my disordered piles, where it always belonged. The book’s absence existed in my hands and under rising waves of anxiety, but my shelves know nothing about absence. It’s their purpose to appear perpetually full. Its presence exists in the midst of their fullness, though; inseparable as a scent, fixed as the moon’s faces and phases. My next calming indulgence in certainty, then, will be to discover exactly what place I’ve been holding for it. There are no empty spaces, but things can be moved. They all have a place, and even if I never determine which one is right, there is still a right one. I’ll lift an unread book from the top of a pile and wipe dust from its jacket with my sleeve, then take another from a shelf because the first better fits its spot. They’re arranging themselves slowly into the final picture of me. Water drops drip from the book shop’s awning and freeze into fine lines under my eyes. I come out of it slightly better adapted to make the choices that clamour for my attention from beneath the street’s cryptic noise. I’ll put the book that I bought in exactly the right place, then forget about it like I forget the dreams that guide me into the most untarnished copy of sleep.

To Coffee

This could be where we get that feeling of meeting for the first time again and the world’s exhausting gestures dissolve around us, but I’m starting to get nervous that you won’t show up. I know I asked for you because, if it’s a habit, then the sun habitually rises and your aroma habitually arouses. It’s just part of my nature to do so. The room’s accidental noises get louder and attack me more directly the longer I wait for you. I picture your gentle colour, the enthralling way you rock from side to side and the anxious shake that I cherish in my hand as I reach out to hold you, but a snippet of conversation interjects its cold reflection of your absence. Whatever swarms of words, heavy steps and cutlery clinks might try to do, though, I’ll always be battling to piece together some image of you in my head. Your form exists there like a rule my thoughts have to obey.

Seeing you arrive always has the captivating mystique of an introduction, but I’m blown further from the course of being myself every time. Everything about you battles more fiercely for my attention, more intricately obscures the possibility of ever having lived without you. I wake up with breath crawling into my lungs as if it had somewhere better to be, but I can carry it because I know I’m going to learn your name again. It’s been festering for too long now and I’m running out of ways to entertain the trivial whims of oxygen. As soon as you get here, I’ll feel every cell in my body become infused with the smiling drive that brought you to me. I just have to wait a little longer. I’m starting to become conscious of aches in my limbs, memories of isolation that hover like flies and several other problems that I didn’t choose to have. The noises are still getting louder and your image is becoming simultaneously sharper and more distorted in my mind. The whole world is resolving into a vessel of grief for your touch, but I’ve asked for you. I know you’re going to be here soon, because these words would have no shape in a story where you won’t be. 

I care about a lot of things. If I could choose, I wouldn’t spend so much of my time thinking about just one of them. Some affections can become a framework to all of our other worries, though. That’s why my entire day conforms to your therapeutic shape. This morning, when routine dragged me into the light five minutes before my alarm had a chance, you were the first thing I thought about. I woke up wondering what thoughts would be passing through my head by the time I finally laid eyes on you again. It’s the same every morning, and every night when my eyes are closed I can tell in the reluctant wilt of my limbs that I’m starting to want you again. Tonight, you’ll be the last preoccupation I postpone my sleep to indulge. It might seem excessive, but I can only imagine my days falling apart if I structured them around a form less intoxicating than yours. 

The noise in here is almost enough to sever me from my fantasies of holding you up to my lips, losing my mind in your smell and finding it again in an ecstatic draught that blunts every sharp edge in the room. When someone laughs, their abrasive cackles fall onto my head like rain, but I can’t escape and find shelter. Forgetting you isn’t an option. Nothing outside would hurt less than captivity under these burning artificial lights, because if I never see you again I’ll be buried with your name on my tongue. The streets may be crawling with imposters, around whose shapes I could learn to wrap my day, but none of them are sleek enough to fall between the cracks in my broken sleep. I could meet a new one for the first time every day and it would still teach me less than one brief waft of your enlightening scent. Someone shuffled quickly past the window, with their hands in their pockets and their head down, because it’s starting to rain. The weight on their brow was a phantom of that life without you. It’s one that I’ll never have to carry because of the shelter you’ve taught me to find in hidden corners of the day. They drew my eyes into a soothing field of drizzle, which allowed the fantasy to stay in focus while your vacant space took a merciful step backwards. 

In that ongoing daydream, you arrive decorated with sincere apologies for the delay, which I dismiss as if I hadn’t even noticed the wait. In effect, I really haven’t noticed it, because now that you’re here, that hollow torment is as far beyond recall as a face in the background of my dreams about you. I look at you like I’ve just landed on Earth and its oceans are shining their entire depth into my eyes. All of the ways this bustling room could hurt me are washed away in a warm, embracing tide. I can almost taste you just by thinking about that weightless moment of release, but the air still taints the back of my throat with its confusion of hostile voices and time that oozes in tangible excess. I can almost feel your warmth, because it’s beyond the scope of daydreams that soon it won’t become my own. Under this frightening deluge of seconds, though, nothing that’s soon feels certain. When you’re here, I won’t believe that anything at all happens soon, because every speck of hope that brightens my eyes belongs to that present. I’ll be too busy getting to know you again and losing myself in your charms. I’ll already be daydreaming of the next time I get to meet you.