I found it everyone, I found it, I figured it the fuck out.
Monday nights.
Where Mondays exist only to draw & quarter the 9-to-5ers, it puts me back in a sense of sanity. It’s the bookstore that does it. When I think about leaving work and heading behind the register at Housing Works, my insides melt a little? Like when you think about Christmas? Like that.
Everyone I’ve met – or meet – is new. No connection to any of the million things that wring my insides on a daily basis, just there for books and charity and true, genuine interaction with a few true, genuine people. It feels severely & sincerely New York, the New York I always wanted to live in. Indie bookstores that play Elvis Costello, and I can ring someone up and turn small talk into a discussion of Death Cab for Cutie’s discography, all while eating fresh-baked cookies and digging through freshly donated books.
When I started at Bonaventure, I didn’t know one person on campus, but I knew those grounds were where I needed to be. And the hundreds of people who felt the same way, we all gravitated to each other, we all formed these bonds out of nothing – and everything. And this, this feels the same. So organically grown. That smile? That’s seriously, really Tanya. That is a conversation I don’t have to force, an interest I don’t need to fake.
Every time I leave the store, I can do anything. Write a book, knit a sweater, run a marathon, because no one has notions to preconceive. I haven’t a mold I try to fit. Perhaps that’s why I look forward to even the train ride home, alone, and the rest of the evening in my bedroom, alone, because in these few small hours I’m grasping who I can be when no one knows me. And I either sound like an aspiring drama queen or a closeted murderer, I realize, and I’m probably totally blowing my cover, but man, Monday nights.
::Abrupt ending::
