brigdh

I was at my university's library today, on the fourth floor-

which is actually the sixth or so floor, because in addition to a second floor, there's a 2A, and then several other new combinations of numbers and letters, which makes counting actual levels difficult. Not that it matters, because once you get that far into the building, all the floors start to look the same, rows and rows of shelves and tables and desks and white-washed pipes. I was looking for a book for a class, which turned out to be useless; it was by one of those strange postmodern/feminist authors from the 80s and 90s who decided to do anthropology in the form of poetry. Nice enough idea in theory, but you can't cite them in papers. Most of the books in that section are written in languages I can only guess at, things that look like Arabic and Hindu and Korean, the few English titles strangely geometric between the silver and golden scripts. It's always too quiet, because the people who come to the library to study or gossip away from their roommates tend to stick to the first few floors, and you're left with ten stories populated by only a few solitary searchers, pursuing some obscure text. Whenever I go up there, it feels like watching a horror movie: somewhere between scared and excited and amused at my own silliness for being afraid. There's a thousand hiding places, and I'm never quite sure if there might not be someone behind the next row, watching me from the spaces between the books. The people in the distance, the heating system, and water in pipes are the only sounds, and like static or white noise, they make the silence seem that much more all-encompassing, until I'm certain I'll hear a footstep directly behind me at any second. Not that I ever have, but there are weird things on the upper floors of the library: a single small child's school desk toppled over and cobwebbed in a corner, or a vertical pipe in the middle of an aisle, so big around that I have to take off my coat and bag to squeeze past and reach the rest of the books.

-and a novel caught my eye with a prettily poetic title. I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open to the cover page, where in pencil someone had written, "Be warned: it's not nearly as good as it should be".

That digression was so much longer than the actual sentence.

Also, because I really am just that clumsy, I dumped an entire cup of coffee over my lap and computer a few minutes ago. Sticky and annoyed and worried about the state of my necessary-to-life electronics, I left the coffee shop and walked home, and on the way over the bridge I saw a heron or stork or something, some gorgeous long-legged, smoke-grey bird winging across the river.