Bookstore Pillars
Memories don’t just live in you. They live in all sorts of places. Walls. Pillars. The corners that held you when you didn’t know you needed holding. I leaned against a pillar the other day the way I have leaned against it my whole life, same angle, same weight. It settles. A pillar can hold more of you than most people ever will. I had been here before. I had never left. There was a wall in the back of a bookstore, a section nobody visited, where a boy sat on the floor, finger on a line like it was the only solid thing in the world. He is me. I am him. Neither of us surprised. The store is gone. But the wall is still there, sealed inside a building I can no longer enter, still holding the weight of him, as walls do. And through the pillar, through the lean and the angle and the weight, I reached him. Or he reached me. I’m not sure there’s a difference. The boy had found it in his book. I had found it somewhere else entirely. Different pages, same words, a whole different story. And through the wall he whispered them back, “they will not break me.” And all you can do is laugh, because it’s funny and it’s not, and you’ve been laughing like that your whole life. So you lean deeper into it, and you know, the way you have always known. The way he knew. That those words would forever be true.