I run my eyes over the spines, searching each font, each design choice (blocky, emotional letters or finely chiseled, reserved serifs? plain, workmanlike matte finishes, or brash, multicolored gloss?) for that special something. I used to do this when I was a kid, too, when I tried to read the adult fiction stacks in my hometown library, working from A to Z, poring through the shelves, waiting for that one title to jump out at me, catch my eye and demand to be read.
And there it is again, too, rising up in me in the present moment: that old sense of longing, the hope that this time I might find the book that will save me, rescue me from myself.
But I know my enemy of old, and I know his ways, so I breathe (the smell of paper and ink, the smell of old wood and dust) and let the feeling pass, until it is enough that I am here, now, and just then my eye snags on a book that turns out to be next in a series I'd started reading a year or so back.
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One year ago: Cycling
Two years ago: Ragtimes
Four years ago: Paranoid
Eight years ago: my inexplicable heart
Nine years ago: Up on the Roof
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