I once owned a bookshop. A small space on the ground floor of my parents’ town house, entered through a shoe shop. Bespoke solid-wood shelves majestically lined three of the four walls, from the ceiling down to the dark carpet, which occasionally left customers slightly perplexed.
“Do you have slippers here too?”
I just wanted them to feel the same cosiness I did. When I think about it now, perhaps it was my slippers that confused them.
Only forty-four steps separated my bed from the tall counter running beneath the windows along the fourth wall. Beyond the windows, a historic lane led to a seven-hundred-year-old bell tower.
I was home.
Gradually, the drawers filled with the scent of handmade paper. Exceptional pieces in hard and soft bindings, to which I gave titles before there was any content to carry them. They were impossible to resist. So I did not resist.
One day I will write in them, after all.
We all have a weakness for something. Mine was the blank pages of notebooks.
The one now resting in my hand was one of them. The dusty-rose cover had faded. The tiny flowers, however, had retained their outlines. So had the single sentence written in ink, still clearly legible on the first page.
“How I decided that, in a year’s time, I would be the person I am.”
I touched it with a tenderness that surprised even me. With each letter I traced with my finger, a drawer of the antique table opened inside me. With the dry scent that did not belong in this room. I filled six drawers with blank paper and called it a collection.
I am sitting in my armchair and at the same time at the table, where the green lamp comes on.
Drawer after drawer made its way inside me. Through the coloured covers and their blank interiors, through memories so present that I could barely convince myself that more than half my life had passed since then. All the way to that raw grief, nostalgia, strange peace. The world stopped again. Or I stopped the world. Instinctively, I placed my palm against my chest, as though I wanted to protect my own soul with it. A tear ran down my cheek. My lips curved gently into a smile.
I had myself.
The last drawer closed quietly. I brought my blurred gaze into focus.
Beyond the window, the silhouette of the old bell tower rose before me any longer.
When my parents sold the town house three years later, the table stayed behind. The notebooks moved with me onto new shelves. The memory of the day I wrote that sentence stayed there too. I could not take it with me. Until today, I had no idea that the dusty-rose notebook had carried it away with it.
I unscrewed the cap. A new Waterman with a gold-coloured nib, finally filled with ink. On the white page beneath the original sentence, I wrote:
Beneath the White.
In the same handwriting.
The gentle sound of metal gliding over paper changed the silence. The golden nib left a dark-blue trail behind it, slowly seeping into the fibres. It wrote the first words of this text. An invitation to write out of passion. Into the intimacy of what remains beneath the surface. Yes. Beneath the white, we remain fully exposed.
I laid the pen across the open notebook.
I missed myself.
