A Library To Be

“You keep telling me you’re working on something but I never see the results!”

 “Am I going to have to maintain you for the rest of my life?”

“You can’t depend on me forever. I won’t always be around!”

 “To me it seems like you’re playing. When are you going to take your life seriously?”

“You’re twenty-five now, you’re old!”

“Where do you want to take your life?”

Neither of us have an answer for her. I don’t feel adequate enough to articulate myself not that it would make a difference if I did. All that will calm her is all that I don’t have, confirmation I’ll fulfil her dreams in the way she dreams them.

I know every single article she’s organized into creating this library. In the financial section is all she has spent on me from my first diaper right through to my private school fees and even the toiletries I still depend on her for. In the album section is every picture that’s ever been taken of me. She still cracks up at an eight-year-old me smiling with no front teeth. It cracks me to see the sense of loss in her eyes when she mourns over photos were I’m on stage receiving awards for my academic achievements. “What happened to my little girl,” I assume she wonders.

The buzzing of the lights overheard is the only thing cutting through the silence. Each foot lands a little too hard as she steps back and tilts her head. Her eyes draining of hope with every exhale. And now empty, she sends a photo album from the dream section flying through the air, ejecting pictures throughout its flight. A photo of me wearing an oversized graduation cap and gown lands in a trash can right before the album thuds on the ground. A distant thud so loud it slaps me awake.

Less audible thuds then follow as I hear my mom sweep out the corners of the house, her everyday morning routine. Keys chime before and after the door is open then shut. The gate rumbles once, twice then nothing. No more sounds, she’s off to work, I take my first breath.

Holding a fist full of blankets I swing my arm over my body. A cold front sweeps over me as I get up to open the curtains. The cold shivers out of me as the sun’s light warmth defrosts my body. I turn around to see her rays reflect off the surface of the shiny book covers embellishing my bedroom walls, their twinkle tickling my eyes I can’t help but giggle. “…when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it,” I’m reminded of my favorite Paulo Coelho quote as my gaze fixes on a laminated A4 printout of The Alchemist ’s book cover. She’s not alone, but part of a grid of laminated, A4 book cover printouts that stretch three walls wide. Rows and rows of them, my most paradigm shifting reads, reach from just below my ceiling to just above my floor, separated by long strips of caramel brown paper an inch thick, that serve as the bookshelves. I glide over to my desk and chair, a two piece combo my mother bought me back when I was in high school. On both sides of a sheet of white paper, I journal my dream as vividly as I remember it. Reliving the noisy, emotional piercing back and forth I’d had with myself, words now engraved as paper cuts on my mind.

“How long will you leech of your mother?”

“You say you’re doing the best you can but you spend all day sleeping!”

“You’re not depressed, you’re choosing to be useless.”

“The universe isn’t plaguing you with meaningless suffering, you’re creating it for yourself. What happiness are you expecting from your bad choices? You hardly eat and when you do you consume toxins, you refuse people who reach out to you because feeling misunderstood is the only time you feel special. You don’t even open your windows for God’s sake.”

“You need to make a choice, either you start living and contribute to this world especially the mother you say you care about, or leave it, there’s no value in being a waste of resources”

After three firm yet careful jerks, I manage to pull out the drawer then pick out a file titled “Dreams”. While placing today’s entry in the “Library Dreams” section, I check the last entry’s page number and realize that it had just recurred for the hundredth and eleventh time since I dropped out of varsity four years ago. I decide to sit a little longer to read through the variations there have been over the years, inspiring myself to turn it into a short story. And so I selected all the individual parts I liked from the various entries and Frankensteined them into a master work that I’m not too ashamed of. I then submit it to a literary journal I know centers on dreams. I then check my mail to find today’s writing prompt, “Write a story about a character that gives up comfort and security to follow a passion they now realize at the end of a life with no success was a mistake.” It knocks the wind out of me. “That’s enough living for today,” I say, pulling up the edges of my lips in self comfort as I draw the curtains to a close then softly float back into bed. Once more my blankets shield me from the cold but are completely permeable to my anxiety. I fade away as it sets in hoping I’ll pull from the dream world a scenario that isn’t the worst possibility about where it is my life could be headed.

Tomorrow comes with its familial sounds of morning that end with the rumbling of a gate. I rise from bed to open my curtains then sit at my desk, body tingling from the stimuli of light. On days like these when I wake up with no remembrance of what I had dreamt, I jump straight into a writing prompt exercise then submit it to wherever I find suitable. I open my email to discover that the Dream Journal wants to pay for my work. I don’t know how time would tell it but I heard three consecutive “rings”, first money had been deposited into my PayPal account then it had been received into my bank account and now a cute book store assistant smiles my way as a I close the door behind me.

“Can I be of assistance Miss?”

“Do you have any copies of The Alchemist?”