Store On The Borderland
You take in the ambience as you walk past each shelf, glancing down the aisles, your eyes flitting from spine to spine, alighting on titles that you are sure you have taken in, but have forgotten seconds later.
Here is a row along which you can see only oversized tomes featuring art by artists that you adore, but that you have never seen in print before.
Here is a selection of collected comics and graphic novels that you have been looking for for ages… too many long lost childhood loves for you to start picking out the ones that you wish to leave with right now. There will be time to sift through them later, you decide.
Here are the novels, and of course there are tons of authors here that you have been meaning to try, but haven’t found the time for, or copies of their most infamous titles as are on display here and now.
You are certain that you are reading all of the titles, but try not to think about any particular one… too disappointing to find that in amongst the multitude, you’re having trouble focussing on any particular one. The words slip off the agitated surface of your mind like oil off a heated pan.
Didn’t it always feel like this when you went into a bookstore, or a comic shop, or a music place? Fresh, previously unthought of treasures picked out for their awesome covers or titles or even something as insubstantial as a typeface and a whim? New, or at least new to you, work by people that you’ve already fallen for, but may have forgotten about until your fingers flip past that crisp, newly printed edition?
The happy hours spent browsing, never entirely sure what you might find, and constantly alert for something exceptional. Before everything you bought seemed like it was just working towards some arbitrary imperative, or appeasing a collector’s need to do nothing more than complete.
That dichotomy of growing up… that finally having the resources to own what you wanted seemed to invalidate the desire to want it.
But in this place, you’re back in that place.
And of course it’s familiar.
You’ve been here before. Although of course it was a little different then.
First off, it was that little second-hand bookstore that you used to escape to during lunchtimes while in the sixth form at school. The chunky old guy that ran it, who must have been all of thirty, got so acclimatised to your awkward teen face that he would leave you in charge when he went to the evil little toilet in back. There are the rows of old romance novels that kept the place afloat, with the local housewives and old dears bringing in armfuls at a time, and taking as many away again, once a month.
You got first pick of any new horror or fantasy paperbacks that came in. You got a credit line that to this day you’re not one hundred percent certain you fully paid off… he probably wasn’t either. He used to keep track of credit in pencil on the base of the staircase that bisected the store.
You were such a piece of furniture in the place that the guy’s girlfriend called you by name when she brought their son around to visit, and looked around the store with barely disguised disdain. At least, that’s how you read it. Now, when you think about it, it looked like exactly the face a woman that had fallen in love with an incredibly intelligent guy who was spending his time running a second-hand bookstore in a town where hardly anyone reads should be making.
But at the same time, it’s the store that the two hippies and the wife of one of those two hippies moved into, when it came time to shift out of their tiny, crammed full comic shop, with the giant Spider-Man painting over the door. You spent so much of your teens in that place that they still remembered you when you popped back in once a year, years later.
The building they moved into was down a side alley, in the city where your dad lived, and struck you like the most edgy, bohemian place in the world… and, you know, again, they were hippies, after all.
That was the place that made you aware of all the different sorts of comics and music that were out there. When they diversified into clothes, you didn’t buy any, but the fashions on show meant that when you first ended up at a music festival years later, you didn’t go into complete shock.
There were smells there too, that you always felt oddly pungent and colourful for a shop that was mostly full of newly printed paper.
It was years before you realised what those scents were, when suddenly you seemed to smell them most weekend nights.
When most of the people at school thought you were weird, and most of your family would have been more comfortable if you were into sports then words, the people who ran that place, who were older and stranger then anyone else you knew (and that included your dad, who had been in the sixties and everything), used to take the time out to talk to you, to show you the new comics that they thought were cool, because they realised that you’d think they were cool too.
And it is more places besides.
So you walk around, and you feel that wonder that you’ve lost, at finding new words, new worlds, new feelings, and you realise that this place… this mixed up place that both isn’t and is all the great places where you have perused, picked and purchased dreams throughout your life, and is somewhere al of its own into the bargain… doesn’t really exist. Won’t be there when you wake up.
You’ve never been here before. Except, of course, you have, every now and then. And you will be again, every now and then.
