The Library

We all have that one place in our town where we feel most at home. If you've grown up in that same town your whole life, it's likely this is a place you've been continually going to ever since you were small. This is the case with my local library.
When I first started going it was a red-brick building: one floor of bookshelves and the smell of oak polish lingering on cupboard doors. The children's section was relatively small with just a few brightly coloured rugs and deflated beanbags to liven up the look of the otherwise grey walls.

But I loved it. I remember curling up behind a certain bookshelf in the corner of the room, wedging myself between the wall and the shelf in a way that was only just comfortable. I loved that it was like a permanent game of hide and seek, until my parents cottoned on that I was always going to be a child that hid away with a book whilst everyone else made dens out of coloured cushions and squealed: "Mummy, mummy, look at me!" Incidently, it was with my knees tucked up to my chest and my blonde bunches pressed against the wall that I discovered my love of reading, poring over yellowed pages that had been turned hundreds of times before. Looking back, I think this represents how my reading life has been for the past few years: trying to fit it in whenever and wherever I could, even if it meant squeezing it in between lessons or the last half hour I have before going to sleep.

So you can imagine my 8 year old heartbreak when I found out that the library was being knocked down. Red brick by red brick my hiding place was obliterated and a tacky, temporary, too-bright replacement was put in it's place, in between two beauty salons with such similar names there had been a lawsuit. My beloved books were gone, replaced by shiny hardbacks with glossy pictures and authors with smiles that didn't quite meet their eyes. Thankfully the atrocity was rendered unnecessary when within a year a new library had been put in the old one's place and not only had my hiding place been given back to it's rightful owner (me), but it now had cushions, and there was a muted yellow carpet that made the whole room look warm and welcoming. Light could now stream through big glass windows and warm my hands as I flicked through clean white pages, eager for the words to imprint themselves on my brain and transport me to another world just as they always did.

And 8 years later, every Tuesday, I still visit the place I still know the most, in concept at least. I could make my way to the YA section with my eyes closed, guided by the smell of pixie dream girls that never make their way off the page (usually because some skinny boy thinks of them as more than human). I'm still greeted by the familar smile of librarians that have worked there since the days of red-brick walls and are now drinking cups of tea from the vending machine upstairs, and each time I visit, I always see a little girl hidden behind a bookcase, her nose buried in a book and her eyes in another world.