Some would say the books in our library smell old, but I say they smell like home. They smell like years of dreams, surprises, fascination, and wistfulness. On the shelves, small books rest in the shadow of heavy volumes, yet they are their own, equally important and filled to the brim with magical symbols that somehow combine into words, intricate sentences, and mesmerising chapters.
Our books smell like magic.
I wanted bookshelves from floor to ceiling and ladders to climb like they do in stories, and one day that is what I found waiting for me together with a knowing grin (and a conveniently half-buttoned shirt). She had picked shelves of a beautiful oak wood, and started filling them with our already quite impressive collection. But there was space, so much space, to fill with small books, large books, strange, wonderful, and frightening books. And we did, seizing every opportunity to stop at a roadside sale, tiny second-hand bookstore, or large commercial chain.
The hunt for written treasure was exciting.
Nowadays the library is more than full; in fact I suspect some would classify it as overflowing. But that is just one more thing I love about it. No matter where I turn there are books of every colour, shape, and size. No matter where I meet her in this room, our conversations and kisses are witnessed by thousands of worlds and a myriad of characters.
And we are our own story.
Sometimes she is home before me and I always know where to find her – curled up in one of the large armchairs, eyes closed, breathing in the scent of home and relaxing for a few minutes. There is not a single artificial light on in the room then, and I suspect she needs those moments where it is almost like that other time, to breathe.
Sometimes she falls asleep there.
Not so long ago, she started writing again, sitting at the large desk across from the doorway, brow furrowed as she scribbled furiously in a notebook. I resisted the urge to sneak up behind her and devour every word, and she made sure to keep the manuscript somewhere safe (not that I looked for it). She said it was a story for our future child. I said she could always read it to my stomach.
Then she shut me up with a kiss.
Once upon a time, my father read me a story. It was about a brilliant scientist who built a time machine in which he travelled both to the past and to the future. Years ago I learnt that the author of the story travelled to the future, too, but for different reasons and by different means. And yet, as in the story, what carried her forward was a dream of something better, bigger, and perfected.
Utopia.
In the end she found it in a small girl's tight grip on her thumb, and my own soft smile at the improbability of the wonder in front of me. She found it in all the novels she published under a new name, female of course, and in the battered copies of old friend's publications that she acquired in a London thrift shop. She found it in our library, in the familiar comfort of dripping wax, but also in the high-tech inventions she marvelled at, tinkered with, and eventually built herself.
I wonder what my young self would have had to say about all of this. I am the mother of the author's child, the author who wrote her books long before I was born, yet was here to see the birth of our daughter, and to read those books to her one day.
Magic, it seems, is endless. And I keep Helena G. Wells in my heart, sharing with her the love for rustling pages that smell like home.
For as long as time allows.