The Library
work in progress
Note: The Library was first published by Paraxis. Permission was kindly granted by the editors of Paraxis and the author to for reprint in Synaesthesia Magazine.
I own a library. Its various sections contain a few hundred volumes of fiction and non-fiction, an extensive newspaper archive, around a hundred TV documentaries, some scientific papers and a very small number of feature films. It contains no poetry. I can't be sure about these figures as I have never seen the library in its entirety, but it's an educated guess.
I find new sections at regular intervals. Some of them are packed with books; others hold no more than a fragment of a story. I expect there is a system to it all and I would love to discuss it with the librarian, but I've never met her.
The library exists only in my head.
The sections, wings and rooms of my library are memories of childhood places. They're gardens, classrooms, forests, a ballet studio. As memories go, they're just like anyone's: three-dimensional, photorealistic images of what these places looked like at some point in the past. When you look closely you see the brain doesn't render every corner of a memory with the same level of detail. Sometimes you just don't remember if there was a shrub behind that swing on your school yard and so the area is kind of fuzzy on closer inspection. You can move around in your memories, take various points of view, play with perspective. The memory itself appears static, much like the background in a video game.
There are about three dozen sections in my library that I have access to at the moment. There are no shelves in any of them; there don't have to be as the books are not being stored as actual volumes, either. No bound paper to pick up and leaf through, no covers, no dust jackets.
The ‘books’ don't look like anything. Literally, they don't. They're
ghosts of written content.
The Library
Note: The Library was first published by Paraxis. Permission was kindly granted by the editors of Paraxis and the author to for reprint in Synaesthesia Magazine.