Genev

Something was different when I arrived at the library. Some of the book groupies were there as usual. I saw the quiet pocket protector man waiting to check out a stack of books, but the high school teacher who was always there ploughing through the history books was somewhere else today. I had a secret crevice in which I could hide myself away with some european surrealist. I rarely checked books out, instead I placed careful and inconspicuous markers in the books that I was reading. They were scattered throughout the whole library, but I knew the location of each of them, like I knew the distance of old friends and I would occasionly check up on them to see how they were holding up. I was in the library enough. I could have lived there. I almost always stayed until closing time, with my hours of roaming the corridors and flipping through pages composing my days. However, that day my hiding place in a closed section of the building did not hold the same familiarity or maybe it was too familiar. None the less, I was afraid as I sat in the delapidated chair beneath the cracked window. I was reading a biography on Jules LaForgue and I realized that I could have been him, the man who spent most of his life cut off from the world, stuck in the private pages of some other library, scarcley living on a glass of water and half of a hard boiled egg. I was him and it terrified me. What if it was always this way? I might never speak again and no one would know that there was a life that lived in a library and a coffee shop that had a terrible case of insomnia, an unparallel person. My life was disconnected from other lives. And it was of my own chosing. I reguared people as objects, surfaces that said and acted based on their interrelatedness and the coaxing of their own egos. I never included myself among them, but perhaps I was just as shallow. My judgements kept me away, maybe I was missing the humanity of humans. Maybe it is present in the morning crowd or the pretending people at the coffee shop and I just couldn't see it. I wondered if people removed their masks when they layed in bed at night or drove to work in the morning.

It was there that I decided to venture out of my central shell and journey to a jazz club at the opposite end of the city. I would stay out late, have some drinks and socialize with the other humans. Maybe, I would even enjoy the company of a few of them. I was excited and nervous as I ran home, sloshing through the streets with my decision in my hands.