Self-portrait of a bookshop

I can get a hint of what is going on through the white curtain. The glass of the store window vibrates whenever someone opens or closes the door of the little shop. Voices, conversations covered by gentle music, softs “thank you’s”, and then the bell ringing when the clients leave.

Nothing for a while.

It is a slow Sunday afternoon, and the days are getting shorter and colder way faster than I ever thought they would before moving to this country. The bell rings again, and someone gets in. From my position, I cannot see them locking eyes, the clients walking around the store, but I can feel their gazes seeking each other. The pace of their steps is telling a story. Second. No. Third date. They haven’t slept together yet. But her hands cannot keep off him for longer, I sense she’s grabbing that thick book with a yellow cover as a strategy to stop herself from running to his arms. A couple of cockroaches are sipping tea in the front cover. She stares at him. Smiles at him. I cannot see him, just his body growing a couple of centimetres after that interaction. He walks over. He stops by her side. Now I see them both from my little hiding spot. She’s craving him, hungry in the most inappropriate way. Anyone could see that. Except him, I guess. He touches a few more covers, undecided about which book to hold. I sense he's only pretending to be interested in literature.

I lose interest and look around the bookshop again. I can see towers of books, all shaped differently, all waiting patiently for a new home. I think of my own towers of books, waiting for me in the room I’ve been calling home for a couple of months now. Of my own bookshop dates: endless, slow adventures through old, dusty shelves. I remember the exchange of glances in a basement without any natural light, whispers at the end of the corridor, shy hands sharing books. I see myself pointing at books I love and finding him nodding.

“Yes, good one.”

“Loved that one, too.”

“No. What is it about?”

Books on a first date, on a third date that felt like a first, books that said all what he could never say about himself. Books as gifts after solo trips cut short because the end of the world was coming to us. Books covered in ugly lies, that I cannot read peacefully anymore without picturing the face of the daughter you have with the woman you lied to. Books that I never gave back because I never heard from them again after looking too long into their eyes. Books that I bought because “what do you mean you have not read it?” and because I needed them to know how life felt through those pages so they could grasp how life felt through me.

I see myself, years ago, writing stories about tormented characters who would sleep surrounded by cigarette butts and books tossed across their rooms. Broken souls who kept reading to avoid seeing their lives fall apart. I laugh at the twisted idea of having become one of my characters—no cigarette butts, but clothes, notebooks, and sometimes receipts lying on the wood floors for weeks.

I have been sitting here for a couple of hours now. I feel it in my body, restless feet doing their little dance in a rhythm I didn’t remember I knew, my mouth distractedly biting at my fingernails. I am trying it again. Trying to write for myself in a room full of people. Everything is foggy. I am not wearing my glasses, and I had one too many drinks last night. I shiver. I wish for that misty, grounding scent of burning orange wood to fill the air around me again—the tang of citrus oil and bark, bright and smoky. As if the tree is releasing all its sunlit memories into the fire, a fragrant memory of ripened fruit. I wish to overhear the distant conversation my parents are having in the kitchen while I get closer to the fire. A half empty mug, the aftertaste of a clementine. A bunch of dried flowers in the middle of the table.

The sound of several keyboards, all of us creating, brings me back. Back to the empty bookshop. The cold Sunday afternoon. The pounding headache. The cold feet. And they said you could not find home far from where you were birthed.