I am a Library

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

1

“You’re actually a really interesting person.”

An underclassman told me this as we chatted, hiding away in one of the music program’s storage rooms. I’ve since lost track of the conversation’s details, but that sentence always stood out to me. There are two reasons:

1. I’m a very prideful person. I love praise, and I also love to hate praise from anyone other than myself.

2. I’ve heard this sentence before in different shapes, but I never realized it until then.

Around a month earlier, a desk mate alluded to something similar: “Your thoughts are so interesting.”

A friend who I knew since the 6th grade once texted me, “Your words hit different.”

In my senior year of high school, one of the techs for the marching band remarked, “We (the tech and the band director) were reading your paper and I was so surprised: you’re actually really good at writing!”

These moments, no doubt polished and reframed countless times by my ego, often echo in my head—not because they made me feel good, but because they outlined an uncertainty that I always carried:

To everyone around me, who am I?

Am I a library?

People are always around, but no one talks. Isn’t that just like me?

Do people stick with libraries? Do they hang around after learning about how interesting they are?

That’s not like me.

After that conversation with my underclassman, we never spoke directly again.

After my desk mate spontaneously talked with me, it felt like a new wall with a tiny little window rose between us.

After I read that message from my friend, I replied, “Well, of course,” and ended the conversation.

As for that tech…

We still make food together sometimes.

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Click to see the image on Cara.

What is a library?

Am I a library?

Are my thoughts, words, and actions like stories? Can you catalogue and shelf them for later reading?

Can people interpret my personhood for a greater cause? Do I have librarians who can help communicate what I mean? Where to find me? What I have?

I am not a library.

2

My mother took me to the public library frequently when I was a child. She’d let me and my sibling go off to browse the children’s section on our own as she herself looked at books in both the adult’s and children’s section.

My sibling and I liked to read similar things. The only difference was that I preferred stories with animal leads while my sibling liked books filled with magic. Those things often intersected, and we naturally read outside our preferences anyway.

I loved picture books. I loved old-fashioned children’s stories. I loved witty, clever writing, and I also loved stupid things.

These are things I still enjoy today.

As we grew, I lingered in the children’s section. My sibling graduated to the teen area and got hooked on romance and drama, but I couldn’t let go of the children’s section. How could I bear to leave all the books I hadn’t read yet? Not to mention, I attempted to read so-called “teen” books in the school library, but I found them so full of mentions of romance that I couldn’t be bothered. Even as I grew, I never related nor desired that sort of story, and the mere mention of a fluttering of a heartbeat or a page-long description of a person’s perfectly dappled eye color made me drop books like a hot plate.

Children’s stories were never as corny when they described love.

Maybe because of my height and baby-face, no one cared when I browsed the children’s section as a teen. I never felt pressured to leave it, either.

Unlike the coercion of floating voices and passing eyes in school, the public library felt much more genuine and frank. Everyone was looking for their own books, thumbing through pages, surrounded by the perfume of a thousand books and magazines.

I always felt comfortable wandering the bookshelves of that library by myself, finding a chair, and reading through a pile of books until my mother and sibling came to fetch me. Then, we’d go to the DVD section all together and borrow a movie to watch after dinner.

We didn’t talk to anyone besides the receptionist, but my mother always smiled and nodded at the people passing by. I’d stare at the person reciprocating her greeting, and sometimes they’d smile at me, too.

I never smiled back, but that’s because I wasn’t used to smiling without being prompted verbally. Sometimes I would remember to nod back, and I’d feel satisfied.

Most people at libraries sit and read no matter how long you watch them. Some of them browse, others use the computers, and a few whisper questions to the librarians. Everyone is quiet, everyone has their own purpose, and everyone gets an answer.

I like that kind of world. It feels like a community. A place where everyone gets acknowledged and sent down their own path alongside others.

Libraries are public private places. You’re allowed to explore things at your own pace and with your own concerns. Nobody needs to know the details to accept that you are there, enjoying your time quietly beside them.

It’s because of this automatic acceptance that we feel human in such a silent space.

3

I don’t go to the library anymore. The public library I went to as a kid now offers audiobooks and eBooks on its website. But my greed for stories has expanded, and I have since learned to read stories on wider websites such as blogs, internet archives, and web novel platforms.

A large part of the latter’s fun is browsing the books and reading the comments, either recommending or discussing each novel. I read on foreign sites and had to pick up various cultural conventions and slang to understand what was going on. That in itself was great fun as well.

After getting a vague understanding of the culture of those online spheres, I always looked forward to reading comments. Seeing how others reacted to the author’s choices became habitual. In heartfelt praise or mindless bashing, it was always entertaining to read these comments and try to understand the discourse. Direct quotes were used to discuss the author’s strengths, the merits of reading flash fiction, and widespread lamenting of guilty pleasures.

If a novel’s synopsis was lacking or unappealing to me, I’d run to the comments to see how others felt about the story. More often than not, they provided commentary that convinced me to read the novel regardless of its quality, just to see the story for myself and compare it to the comments.

Eventually, I even read some romance with the urging of these comments.

(It sucked and I still dislike it as a main plotline, but it’s quite fun to read now that I have a wider perspective.)

What does it mean to be in each other’s lives? Especially when we’re separated by an ocean, time, and electronic screens: what does it mean?

Can we even be a community without knowing each other?

Call it introversion, but I always felt a sense of community with these stories and sites that I amused myself with.

Perhaps to me, a community is not a direct show of support or tangible relief, but a passive structure that exists thanks to the weighted influence of beings. A community to me is a shared space governed laxly by a shared interest, a shared acknowledgement.

There’s a sense of fellowship in these online libraries that makes me feel like I’m walking among others, finding their footprints in the comments like drawings in the sand. I’ve never met these people and I don’t care to, but I know that they’re people, reading and writing and browsing the site just like I do.

Strangely enough, it feels like I’m part of a community. It feels like our footprints walk alongside each other, even if the impressions never seem to last.

4

I’m not good with friends, they’ve disappointed me in the past.

The concept of friends is unclear to me, but I still seem to have some. Should I be grateful? Should I be more mindful of having them? Be more in touch with their lives and their needs?

Why give more than what I already am?

I was always far more interested in myself. I recognized others’ existence, but felt no joy in forced interactions. It might have been an effect of reading only children’s books and biographies for so long, but I grew used to accepting things as they came instead of seeking connections for myself. The characters I read about always had another character spawned in to be their friend, after all.

What is a friend, anyway?

As a child, friendship was a directory of people who shared nice things. One friend had delicious snacks while another had all the latest video games. One classmate was smart and admirable, while another was funny and amiable.

Did I have any of those bargaining chips? I don’t think so.

If the other kids shared their belongings and freely displayed their personality, did that make us friends?

When I became a teen, friendships were bonds by association. These people all grew up together, those ones liked the same television show, and the ones over there talked smack about everyone. Some shared notes for tests, others pooled money for lunch, and still others made it a nonstop joke to harass each other.

Were my desk mates my friends? My instrument section? The people my sibling brought over to hang out with?

I never thought that any of my relationships were sincere; I never extended a bridge of trust to begin with. Not only did I not want to, I didn’t know how to.

And so these days...

I have friends.

Are we close? Who knows. I just feel in tune with them.

I’m not used to remembering special dates or favorite foods or any of that trivia, and I don’t expect my friends to remember anything of me either. Still, they tell me, “Happy birthday”, and give me treats whenever they find something nice. We text each other when we’re idle or when we want to avoid something. I send them videos and photos of things I find interesting. They tell me about their lives and say things like, “We should meet up sometime.”

These friends tell me things about myself that sound ridiculous to me. You think I’m kind? You think I’m thoughtful? That I’m lonely?

I hate praise from anyone other than myself, but what they say rarely sounds like praise.

These friends have friends of their own and insist that some of them are also mine. They quote messages and mentions that I would never look at, list instances and meet-ups that I would never be at, all to prove that it’s true others miss me.

Is that so?

I don’t really know what friends are, but I seem to have more than I think I do. Maybe I’m a library in that way.

Libraries are unaware of which people carry memberships and which people don’t. Still, anyone can stay and read for a while.

Isn’t that just like me? No—this is what my friends are to me. They’re the ones who are libraries, for accepting me even though I had no idea what friendship was. They’re the ones who helped me feel human again, who make me happy to be human.

Can’t I be a library in return?

I don’t mind it when strangers talk and ask for company. I know that people have their own stories to tell and want to let it all spill out, cushion their steps, leave a trail. These people—all people—want to be heard and feel at ease.

I understand that feeling. I also want to hear myself, and I can only do that when I write.

It doesn’t matter who we are to each other, so long as we treat each other like people. So it’s important that we have a place to be people.

In that way, I can be a library.

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