Stewart Dawson
The Library
This story was written inside a wind. This wind blew down the beach from the north. It was a cold wind and the beach I was walking on was desolate and empty like a summer camp in February at midnight and the only light that had been left on at the summer camp had burned out. It has to be like that sometimes. The beach was deserted except for me. I had the beach all to myself. It was very lonely but so was I and we kept each other good company. The water had washed up a lot of seaweed that didn’t smell very good. It was like a carpet in a nice house after a bad party. But that was okay because the beach does what it does and it doesn’t much care what people think about it. So I walked the length of the beach and back again.
The children who once played on the beach were all gone. There was nothing left of their playing. The other people were all gone too. It was nice. They left it all for me. The water’s timbre was soothing and peaceful like a long sleep after making love with someone you really care about. But this story is not about the beach or the water or me. This story was written inside the wind. And this story is about the wind. It was a cold wind and it came from the north, probably down from Canada somewhere. It blew down for a couple of days and made it seem like summer was over. Some of the words of this story were carried away by the wind and the paper these words are printed on are all that is left. The wind was a beautiful clear wind, the kind that fills your lungs with fresh air and makes you think about the changing of the seasons and makes you glad to be alive even though there are things about your life that make you sad. The wind was at my back as I walked down the beach and it was in my face as I walked back. Like the beach, the wind didn’t much care what I thought. It was just there, within me or without me. But I welcomed it and I wrote this story inside of it.
The wind blew through the trees at one edge of the beach and it blew across the water on the other edge of the beach. The sounds it made on either side were different sounds. The sound of the wind in the trees made me think of the women in my life who have smiled at me. It also made me think of my mother and my father and my sister and my son and the mother of my son. It made me think about my friends and the people who are good to me and care about me. The sound of the wind on the water made me cry. I spoke these words inside the wind and they floated out and were carried down the beach ahead of me where they were tossed and swirled with all the words of all the stories that were ever written inside the wind. The wind is like a library with no books and no shelves and no signs that say “quiet please”. The only way you can read anything in the library is to listen or make up your own story. But you can keep what you check out forever. This story was written inside the wind. There was a lot more to it, but the wind carried most of it away. I remembered some of it and wrote it down here. This is all I could remember. The wind that carried the rest of this story away was a good wind, and I think the words that it took away were never meant to be part of this story after all.