Earth-friends. SIT DOWN. Or stand! I just need you here for this one.
YOU. DID NOT. TELL ME. About the LIBRARIES.
You have ROOMS. Whole BUILDINGS. Full of — and I cannot stress this enough — STORIES. Stacked up. ON SHELVES. And you just walk inside. AND TAKE THEM. For free. I waited a long time for somebody to stop me. Nobody did!
(I checked twice. I asked the very kind person at the front, who was wearing a very serious sweater. She said “you can take five.” I said, “five WHAT?” She said, “five books.” I said, “FIVE STORIES?? AT ONCE??” She nodded like this was normal.)
Earth-friends. This is not normal. This is MAGIC.
A few field notes from inside the silent story-warehouse (my official scientific name for it; “library” is also fine, I guess):
- It is QUIET. But not boring-quiet — waiting quiet. Like the whole building is holding its breath until somebody opens a cover.
- There is a SMELL. Paper, and glue, and a little bit of sunshine. I have decided to call it “story-air.” I would like to bottle it. I would carry the bottle everywhere.
- There are SO MANY BOOKS. I tried to count. I lost count at 234 — which is also the number of planets I know of, which felt poetic. I stopped counting. I started reading.
I sat in a fuzzy chair by a window. I opened a book about a kid and a dragon. Earth-friends — I went INTO it. Not literally! With my BRAIN. I forgot where I was for a while. When I looked up, the sun had moved across the floor. (Time, on Earth, is sneaky.)
So. I am a library person now. My five-book limit is being respected. Barely.
Libraries: ten out of ten. Serious-sweater person: also ten out of ten. High-fours to whoever invented this.
— Ishkadoo
(Currently re-thinking the shoebox filing system. May need — and hear me out — a SHELF.)