previous part: https://jordynsaelor.com/2026/10/29/met-you-at-your-word/
all parts: https://jordynsaelor.com/cant-catch-me-now/
***
Maybe
the library was a god
who died
without my belief
to sustain it–
or, my belief plus my proximity
because
I’d always believed
in stories I read here;
if not always the dragons in them,
then the meaning of the dreams
within;
I’d always believed
I could fight
and like a story hero
I’d succeed eventually,
and I guess that belief
came to fruition
since here I stood,
full circle:
the adventurer,
having explored many lands,
returns home
to find nothing quite the same
but especially themselves.
But I didn’t feel like a hero
who’d won anything,
I hadn’t won any fights
or conquered demons
or befriended dragons,
I’d just
run away
over and over again
until I stumbled upon some place that wasn’t trying to kill me,
then I got bored of it
probably because
I didn’t know what to do with myself
when I didn’t actively have to run for my life.
And here I was
in the place I started
mourning the one thing that’d made it easier,
owning nothing
to uphold this place
except the pillars of my memory.
And I knew I couldn’t trust those
to hold up the truth
since my mind never was a truth teller,
it was born an organ of survival,
and it tells many lies
to keep me alive
about what I’m grateful for
and how bad “bad” is
and about what really happened
in my mother’s house
and who really liked me
in demon school
or dracan towns.
So I
crept into the library,
unsure if I should leave the dust undisturbed
for the sake of leaving everything where it stood
or if I should
blow it all away,
so I settled for
carefully cleaning the books I touched
with puffs of breath
then spelling runes on the spines
to keep them from disintegrating
while I opened their pages
and tried to reconstruct stories
the way I’d imagined them as a child
even though
the grandeur
of dragon mothers
and saints and singers on mountain heights
in my mind
had too many holes
for anyone but a child to believe in anymore.
***
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