Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Theresa at the Library

     Theresa took to going to the library by herself on her lunch hour, and sitting in the leather and mahogany reading room to watch the snow fly and write in a comforting black and white composition notebook. Lately she'd felt troubled, maybe by how different their lives were up here? She'd even taken to staring at one of the male librarians a lot, guiltily fantasizing about running away with him to some less-exotic location and living a formally organized by Dewey Decimal System life together. But as she got closer to him, after he renewed some of her books for her, she noticed his odd haircut, his soft fingers, his unweathered face. Theirs would be a life of quiet desperation, of cheating on her part, of absolutely  no kink. She took her books back and didn't walk past his desk again, she started renewing her books online, she started walking on her lunch instead of going to the library. Sometimes all it took was a bit of conscious constructive self-criticism to avoid disaster.

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