Always the Bridesmaid

Part IV

The Library didn't always look the way it does. In fact, the Librarian remembers the way it looked when he first stepped foot in it, years and years ago. He remembers that it was brighter, that the Mediterranean sun streamed in through gaping windows and spilled across gleaming marble floors. He remembers that there weren't books but rolls of parchment, sometimes dusty and sometimes cracking, and sometimes new and soft like fresh-made vellum. He remembers its smell too: honey and wine and sea salt and a smell he couldn't quite identify then but knows now to be lemon. He pictures it now and then, when he's at his worst—how it looked when he first saw it, the wonder it struck in his heart. It welcomed him with open arms, and he stepped into its warm embrace. For days, it felt like a loving mother watching a child play in the sun. The wind sang through the windows, the whispers the Librarian was so used to hearing faded away like scars in his memory, and for the first time in a long while, he felt happy.

Then, he noticed the gate at the Library's entrance.

The Library changed, and so did the Librarian. New texts came in from faraway places, then from places he had never heard of. And they slowly began to encroach on the scrolls he was so used to, into new shelves unlike the marble honeycombs so familiar to him, and they took new forms—unraveling, folding into accordions, separating and binding themselves in wood and then leather. He didn't like the feel of the new texts. They weighed on his arms, and their paper felt rougher. Each sheet bit at his fingers when he wasn't careful and told him terrible things about unfamiliar gods.

And then there were the walls and the floors and everything else that made the Library what it was. Stone crept across marble, and here, the Library was damp, and the Librarian felt it in his bones and in his lungs. Then, it passed into wooden and creaking at the bitter winds outside, and then, into a larger, darker place, filled floor to ceiling with shelves and books. The books themselves began to reek of acid and dust, and they cracked their spines in protest when the Librarian opened them. This is what it looks like now: none of the marble and sunlight and wine and honey of the days when the Librarian first set foot inside it. Instead, it's dark and cold—impressive in the same way a yawning cavern is.

The Librarian changed, too. He learned that he had to when the Library's cold seeped deep into his chest, when he learned that it would only just help him survive its bitter nights. He asked for the robes he would see in the books he read—coarse and woollen at first, then gradually lighter and fitting to his body—and with each step he took away from the linens he once wore, away from the sunlight that brushed his olive skin, he felt as if layers of himself were peeled off, like stockings or vests. It was never about the clothing, understand. It was about the fact that his home on the dust-soaked streets of that city far away grew to be an abstract concept. It was about the fact that the Library was no longer a mother and that he was no longer a person. He was a thing inside its walls, like the books and the shelves and the dusty floors, and it can change any part of them—any part of him—whenever it felt like it.

And anyway, there was the door. Long ago, the Librarian used to see out of it. Now he can't, and he's thankful for that.