Blossoming Between Our Hands

Libraries are forests: chirping with words, freckled with the light of ideas, full of the spicy smell of leaves, seeded with streams of voice and teeming with paths where bones finger forth like tree roots – here the dead artists live on. Libraries are a natural niche for books, blooming between our hands, and are part of the beginning of reading.

I remember trips with my mother to the library when I was little, but big enough to read: the wonder of being surrounded by pictures and words that I could touch, open, listen to and then close; signing my name on my first library card that allowed me to take home almost anything there that I wanted to go into again and again. I remember sneaking into the sex section and being confronted by the human body, naked of clothes and skin, I remember looking up information, finding it and then reaching for it on the shelf, and I remember first seeing poetry. The library and this library card were perhaps my first real sense of responsibility – I promised to return what I had taken (and in the same condition) so that other people could enjoy the materials as well.

Libraries are still a free space, an open space, where all people can come to warm their mind or heal their heart. As a writer, the library is my refuge. Inside the library I can come together with people and chew on thoughts. Inside the library I can wander between rows of trees, sit in their shade and listen to that same story told in so many voices – I can hear my own.

~this is a story i submitted for a contest that i thought i would post here. let me know what you think, or, what your story about the library might be...