(We are all stories in the end.
Just make sure it is a good one.)
Bookshops follow you, stepping on your heels
heavily, more often than your friends,
your shadows.
Yet you cannot resent their tenacity,
and you stop in every bookshop you pass.
Some things remain as constant in this one
as in all the last
(at least the human ones.)
Constant like your memories of the murmuring past.
The mysteries of Agatha Christie make themselves comfortable
on several shelves, their covers
suitably dramatic. Each is a study in
the overlooked, which turns out to be of utmost importance and
why the most ordinary of humans will do the most
exceptional of things. (This will inspire you
when you lose your faith again.)
Shakespeare spills into every shelf nook, every corner,
proliferating especially in this used-book shop. Books
filled with students' unreadable notes,
a million people not listening.
There is a secret to Shakespeare:
once all the words have been stolen for others' use,
their origin forgotten, the plays still stand,
speaking with a strong voice, though perhaps
not saying what you thought they would.
Dickens, though;
you have a soft spot for Dickens.
Battered paperbacks and leather-bound editions
are both frequently found, each incarnation
(dressed up or all awry)
you find delightful in its own way. Of course, the cover is not
what the stories are judged by. No,
the heart of Dickens' stories is what
keeps you parked in the time vortex
while you sit in the library some days, when you need to remember
that Christmas you met him; his stories are filled with
little details: things and people that don't matter to matter to important people, but they
matter to the people that matter to you.
They always mattered to her.
She is in the details, and you think
sometimes
that if you examined the smallest electrons
in a leather-bound copy of Great Expectations
you'd see Bad Wolf waiting for you there
continuing to drop breadcrumbs on the dark book-forest path
that might lead you home
(or wait: Christie and Shakespeare and Dickens and Grimm are not the same story;
you led the little girl with the red hood through the woods:
she now always reminds you to remember the stories.
We are all stories,
in the end.)