I get onto my knees, and stare at the small library.
It was a spectacle to behold.
Hidden behind a storm of dust. Dust cranky from being awoken.
Some of the books neat, and levelled. Arranged for a nonexistant audience.
Yet right next to them, a heap of pages exists, unorganized.
Tossed into a cesspool, comics sticking out at odd angles.
Despite their differences, all of them have one thing in common.
They sit in a tomb, eternally slumbering. No Prince Charming coming to read them.
The culmination of years of collective effort. A diverse mind, filthy with imagination. Dead.

​

I push a volume aside, softly denying it.
Beyond it lied another stack of books. Notebooks.
If anything here was personal, it was these.
Children waiting, wailing, for their parents to come back.
I pick the one at the top, take it out to assess it.
The thumbprints pressed into the dust look like eyes.
Opening it to look at the front page, it's covered in scrawlings.
A spur of passion, turned an artifact. An idea brilliant, yet never fulfilled.
Every other page was empty. Introverted, having never met a pen.
They didn't even have memories to cling to. Atoms that serve no purpose.

​

Putting it back, something else caught your eye.
Another one, this one at the bottom, yet next in line.
Pulling it out was hard, pressed down by everything else.
Kept hidden, pressed into a darker shadow by its only friends.
There was a photo of sunflowers on the front, smiling to the sun.
If they were real, they'd have starved long ago.
Hands pull it open, as if peeking into a brain.
Old rounds of Tic Tac Toe, from other times. Better times.
Relics of a youth passed by, with a carefree game.
Pages of art drawn by someone else, signed in your name.