It tickles my nose, the dust. Sometimes I even sneeze, a sacrilege in such a hushed sanctuary. The shades of the worn-out spines all lean warm – I can firmly say that I have never been in a cool-toned bookshop. I walk through the motions. A name draws my eye, or an enticing word. It is fun to pick up books with titles you wish you had thought of yourself. Envy takes you first, of course. Then the feeling of being small and indebted to this writer is thrown into contrast with the knowledge that the words mean nothing, that the sentences are hollow and characters just ghosts, without a reader to add fire to the fuse.
I stack a pile high: a classic, something post-modern, a friend’s recommendation, the wild card. The shopkeeper logs each one into their system and accepts my £10 note. I usually get change. The titles now belong to me. They fill me up and I know that, regardless of what I do next, my day is not wasted. They stare from my shelf, waiting to be devoured. The words require their context, to be coloured by the experiences of thousands of humans who sit down to read them. Cover to cover. An infinity within paper.
All of this held behind a single title. But for the last three years of my life, the title was as far as I ever reached.
They say it is like a spiral. If I had to manifest such a feeling into movement, a ‘journey’, I would say it was closer to falling in slow motion, so gradually that it is barely detectable. Then a plateau. But ultimately this is false too. It is not just a feeling, singular. It is countless emotions colliding until your mind erases them all. The numbness that follows is the part to avoid. It is tar to your mind.
I always read. It wasn’t an escape so much as a compulsion; there was no sense in not doing it. The stories were beautiful and ugly and uncensored. It so followed that writing was a natural consequence, one of only two things I’ve ever allowed myself to admit I might actually be good at. The other? That’s a secret.
The descent was creeping. I told myself I was tired; distracted; uninspired. I always had something else to do, or think. In class I would look at a piece of air near the page, turning them every three minutes or so. I’m a slow reader, I’d tell them. Echoing the opinions of my teachers, occasionally giving them a feminist slant, I maintained my As while all my other grades slipped. Much of it I’d heard on Radio 4. I spliced together stories I’d written at the age when I only had to imagine what it was like to feel this way. Complex, I used to say. She’s a dishonest narrator.
When your entire identity is based on something that is no longer true, your own skin becomes foreign. Regaining some sense of control takes a different form for everyone. Hunger is preferable to feeling nothing, in my experience. I stumbled my way into university, a lucky imposter. The tapping of keyboards and pens sounds so loud in lectures when your own page of notes is as pale as your knuckles. Sitting next to someone who has read Oscar Wilde’s entire body of work and on the other side somebody who can quote sections of Roland Barthes from memory, and you can’t even cry because all you can think about is how guilty you feel for eating today.
I have reached the end of enough books to know that there is usually a resolution. Here I should tell you how I overcame my struggle, met the love of my life, repaired an estranged friendship, saved the faerie kingdom. None of these are true. Unless the last one is a euphemism. Nothing has changed, except everything has. My whole life has moved one inch to the left, and in the space created there is now room for the emotions that I had abandoned for so long.
There is romance in sadness. I used to strive for it. There is nothing in numbness, no release for thoughts. Someone confessed to me, quite recently, that he doesn’t have a creative outlet, that he feels no need to share his thoughts with the world. I am envious, in many ways. To not have something ensures no possibility of ever losing it. Yet the way he shrugged, like the thought hadn’t ever occurred to him, made me realise how deeply I held the concept within myself. A creative flow that should never be dammed. Yet ultimately it was a moment that reminded me to be content, after all, as I can still read, write, and be read.
By Alice Orr | 18 May 2016