It wasn’t an agreeable day. It just was a wednesdaying Tuesday and the sky was filled with water droplets, but it didn’t rain.
I had planned to check out a few antiquarian bookshops, not just second-hand bookshops with their immaculate shelves of books, as clean as were they new; antiquarian bookshops are different, with no sight of flooring ‘cause there are books everywhere; and no need for wallpaper either.
I asked for poetry. Stacks of unsold books of poems surrounded me in more languages than I could read. The sound of street theatre in my ear, a child laughing. There were no words that wanted to be read by me, so I wandered off, lonely as a— no I won’t go there. But it is safe to say poetry was on my mind.
I found myself zigzagging to another part of the store, past the Shakespeare, past the dangerously steep stair into a basement with even more books. Next to the pitiful pile of feminist books written by men, I found the book I was looking for. Written by a poet but not poetry, they say. I knew of Dylan Thomas because of his poetry; like most, I can state to rage against the dying of the light; this adventurous novelette was unknown to me. Skin trade wasn’t, though; it was what I was here for. The pipe-smoking bookworm sold me the novelette for 9 euros, one less than the signed Jean Pierre Rawie I bought a few days earlier, and with a euro in my pocket, I headed outside. You know it’s a great antiquarian bookshop when even the money is, at the very least, second-hand.
The coffee was brought to me in a clean room. The difference was stark, and the smell of Dylan Thomas’ words seemed out of place. The soft cascade of words for ordinary days, ordinary exchanges, could not comfort the anxiety within me, for I knew in my pocket there was this empty page. This page that I needed to fill, to prove to myself I could write again.
Because everything I did, from the moment I left the house, served only one purpose: trading in my skin; because the creases wouldn’t leave the paper, the ink wouldn’t stick, and for months I wasn’t a writer; I wasn’t a creative. I just was. Resentment started to build. I folded the paper back into my pocket. Took a sip. Maybe the creative life wasn’t for me any more; maybe there was this old version of me who would write even if they didn’t want to, and maybe I was this new version who never got beyond wanting.
I was drowning.
A flood of words and imagery came over me. I had opened up the book. There was this whole world with unusual people and a Pomeranian and, above all, my beloved semicolon. I clung to the curve of its comma to take a breather. My hands began to tremble. This wasn’t meant to be a place to come to a full stop. So I dived right back into the world of Samuel Bennet, where I soon found an undercurrent of rhythmic madness that reminded me why I love to write: to examine every sane part of my world; to find the transition into the insanity that’s just around the corner, or is it the other way around?
I took the folded paper out of my pocket. There were inkblots in the margins. The last few drops of coffee had already gone cold. I paid my dues and wandered back, passing the street performers, who were taking shelter from the rain that just started to fall.
Finally, this Tuesday agreed with me.