“I’ll call you later,” I said, an uncomfortable silence lingering between us. “Love you.”
“You too.” She disconnected the call before I could say anything else, leaving me alone in an empty shop with all of my books.
Up front, sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating the pair of sofas just inside the front doors. They
were tucked in a cozy corner off to the right, straight across from the registers. They were also easy to see from the sidewalk outside, but folks rarely stopped in.
Maybe my sister was right. Maybe I really was holding on to an impossible dream.
Those who dropped by my shop did so because they needed directions, they were hiding away from the cold, or because they wanted to browse. As much as my sister insisted on selling ebooks, I honestly couldn’t understand why folks walked into the shop to browse when they could do the same thing at home.
Those weren’t my customers. I wanted the people who enjoyed leafing through the pages and remembered when books were the best thing around. I was after the customers who walked into a bookstore as though it was a portal to another world, thousands of worlds. Those were my customers.
The customers looking for a place to read the paper with their morning coffee weren’t for me. I also wasn’t interested in folks who only wan
ted to read a handful of pages before walking out again. No. I was after the dreamers, the believers, and time travelers. People like me.
Less than a third of the people who happened to stop by left with something they didn’t have when they first walked in.
The amount of savings I’d put into the shop just to stay open was unimaginable, but it wasn’t something I cared to tell my sister.
Times were tough, for sure, but I wasn’t about to give up on my dream or the one my father had worked so hard to keep while he was still alive.
With my sister’s daily phone call out of the way and the guilt weighing heavily on my shoulders, I went back to the front of the shop to unload the books I could actually place in the store. Hopefully, by the end of the afternoon, someone would realize their mistake and come back for the journals. If not, I’d have to come up with something else.
All morning, those journals clung to the edge of my thoughts. I loved new books. I loved to open them, read the first chapter, and escape my life for a few minutes at a time.
But those journals weren’t just any books. They were personal, private, and not for my eyes.
That said, I couldn’t leave them on the front counter, either.
I’d already checked the inside of the covers, but whoever they belonged to never put their name where I could easily find it.
There was a date on each one, however, spanning over the course of three years. The journals were more than fifteen years old.
Whatever happened to the author after the fact was a mystery. Perhaps the rest of their journals were in another box somewhere, one that hadn’t mistakingly been dropped off the night before.
No one would’ve kept those journals around unless they meant something.
“They do look pretty, though,” I mused aloud, reading over the beautiful writing on the inside of the cover. Whoever owned those journals had wonderful penmanship. It wasn’t something I saw very often. In a world of technology, no one wrote by hand anymore.
“Who are you,” I asked, stroking the journal’s spine. Who did it belong to? More importantly, why did I have this overwhelming need to find out?
The few times I’d tried to keep a journal, I filled half the pages before giving up. So for someone to keep writing day after day for years on end… well, it was something I admired.
Had they done some sort of research and placed their findings inside those books? Did they fall on troubled times and simply needed a place to record their thoughts?
Maybe they were love letters that never reached their recipient.
No matter what was inside those books, I didn’t have the heart to throw them away.
So there they sat, outside my peripheral vision but still close enough for me to see if I turned my head the right way.
Customers came and went, but no one asked about the journals or seemed remotely interested in buying a book. By the end of the night, I’d spent more time trying not to look at the journals than doing my job. Aside from tidying up the place and making a handful of sales, the day had been a complete waste. Unless you include whatever my mind came up with about those journals, of course.
They could’ve belonged to just about anyone. A surgeon, a researcher, an artist, an author… it had to be someone special.
Someone with a lot of passion. Someone who had the dedication to continue their writing for several years.