The Book Nook

9

 We walked to Alexandria's apartment a different route than we had from the Book Nook on the night she attempted to burn what she now carried in her hands. Neither of us said a lot about our conversation in the pub, instead we talked about Alexandria's last two years working in the bookstore. She admitted that when she goes days without being there, she misses it. She started reading to children there not because she had a love of kids but rather fed off their excitement for stories and surrounded her with positivity. It became infectious and next thing she knew, she looked forward to it each week.

It was somewhere around eight-thirty and the moon shone brightly in the cloudless sky, illuminating a park we walked by that also had the help of many lanternposts curving their way through the walking paths.

Alexandria broke away from me at a light run, quickly enough for me to not realize what she was doing until I saw where she was headed. She bounded towards and then leapt onto a curved leather seat of a swing-set, kicking up sand in the process.

"Come on," she shouted as I stared dumbly from the sidewalk.

I followed and sat on the adjacent seat on the old swing where we had to bend our knees because our butts nearly touched the ground. I gently kicked out with one foot, rocking slowly back and forth like a clock pendulum. Alexandria turned in slow circles, wrapping the chains together until they combined all the way down to her head where she then held her long, slender legs out so she would start twirling as the chains undid. She seemed to spin around for minutes.

For a while we played the incredibly childish grade school game of swinging sideways, trying to push each other with our feet so the other person would spin wildly out of control.

It sounds utterly juvenile, but on a moment when I thrust my leg out just as she did, I ended up brushing the side of my right leg along the side of hers and I was all but sure the aftereffect would involve some sort of nuclear reaction of astronomical force.

"I feel like a kid," I said, "staying out after dark well past his curfew, not wanting to go home just yet because there's still fun to be had and nights like this always seemed so endless."

Alexandria stopped swinging and smiled while looking downwards. She hopped off the swing, swooped up her manuscript that lay on the ground and trotted over to the nearby merry-go-round where she sprawled out looking up at the night sky.

The moonlight seemed to bounce off her form; a pale face, dark hair, barely visible but lit just right. The reflective surfaces of the playground structure shimmered as it inched around, set in motion by Alexandria reclining on it. I walked towards the movie-set scene of this ghostly apparition of a girl riding a merry-go-round that seemed to move by its own force.

"I feel like..." Alexandria started, body flat on the metal surface of the merry-go-round, head near the centre and feet hanging slightly over the edge, as I gave the thing a light push from where I was standing.

"Like all I have to do is bang my head repeatedly so I bleed all over the page and only then will something come of it. You know?"

"Yeah," I agreed. It didn't feel like much of a response but I grasped what she was telling me. "I had told you that you can do it and I have no doubts at all."

She spun past me every five seconds, her feet coming within inches of my shins as I would thrust out an arm and give the ride another guiding push.

"Maybe I just don't have it yet," came her voice from far away and then right in front of me, and then far away again.

"Have what yet? What do you mean?"

"It," she enunciated. "That ability to say something worthwhile."

"I don't believe that. You're a very capable person."

"You know what some people say?" she asked then.

"No, what do some people say?"

"That no one ever has anything worth writing about till they're at least forty."

"Then there's your problem right there."

She gave a snort of laughter and turned herself around so that the top of her head was near the edge of the merry-go-round and tapped me on the leg to give her another push.

"But," I went on, "it's not like you can put a solid age number to it. It's not like, oh you need to be alive for such-and-such number of years before you're not a naive moron who doesn't have anything worthy to say. Whoever says that is an idiot and is just making excuses for themselves. Everyone has something worth writing about. Everyone has life experiences unique to their own selves. You do, especially. I mean, sure you'll be a far better writer at forty than you are now, but it's not because you're too young, it's because you're always gaining more and more understanding of life and in a sense we're always continuously changing, expanding, and becoming better. That goes with writing as it does with anything else. The beauty of it is that no matter what, no matter what age, no two people will ever write anything exactly the same, but that doesn't mean that either of them will be less worthy of being read."

I hadn't given a shove to the merry-go-round for some time while I was speaking and Alexandria was finally drifting to a stop almost directly in front and below of me.

"You know," she said, "some writers need to get older before they can write well. For example, Henry Miller had a straight-laced boring job until he was well in his thirties, then he started moving towards a more creative life. If a person is going to tell stories, sometimes they need to live a while so that they can reject the boring and unoriginal dreams that they put in their minds when they were younger, like dreams of a Hollywood Mansion and a young Denise Richards wife."

"Denise Richards?"

"You know what I mean. The dreams that are unique to a writer as an individual are more likely to lead to good stories."

"Which you have. I'm envious of it in a way I guess." I sat down beside her on the motionless merry-go-round. Crossing my arms and leaning against the dividing rails that were next to her, I looked down at her as I talked. Amongst the wondering that perhaps I was talking too much. "Maybe I don't know all the things you dream about or long for. I don't think I've even cracked the surface, in all honesty. And I think it's better to be defined by something like a book. It's something you have entire control over, of how people see you. Everything you could have ever wished to say to someone you can say it in a book. Maybe you never got to say something to a certain person, like you loved them, but you can say it through a story, through the interactions of characters, and people will get it, they'll understand exactly what you were feeling. I think that's why I like books so much. The writer's passion and emotion comes across so vividly, it's so pure and whole. You read their words and you know them. They just wanted to be understood in the realest, most genuine way they know how. Through words. And maybe that's why I find books so reassuring."

Alexandria sat up on the other side of the merry-go-round railing that divided us. When at the next moment her face was mere inches from mine, I pulled from within me the single most amount of boldness I had ever displayed in, arguably, my entire life.

The merry-go-round seemed to be spinning a million miles per second, though it was no longer moving at all.

Somewhere amongst the chaos, I felt the squeeze of one of her hands in mine. I didn't know what she was thinking, but the action said all that it needed to say. This time, words weren't needed.

Definitely my shortest chapter yet, but it was still just as important nonetheless. Things are beginning to change in this relationship; what do you think?

Until next week,

Brendan