Sunday morning was spent in a different city, browsing one of those little bookshop’s you can’t help but wander into. Sepia stained books stacked to the ceiling. Spidery hand written labels in black marker covered in cello-tape. I was strolling slowly, tracing my finger across & down the spines of old books whose pages hold the hours of other peoples lives. Tucked away in the corner of the shop was a book titled: ‘The Homeless Mind’. I read the synopsis. Felt the flutter of giddiness circling my belly. It was a moment that held the perfume of the uncanny. I excitedly scuttled to the counter, where another handwritten sign stated: CASH ONLY. I dug into the forgotten corners of my purse & handed over my only 50p piece to an eccentric small handed man, with horn rimmed, black glasses. His breath smelt of stale coffee and dusty libraries. His teeth were a normal toothy colour; no bleached white bones poking out from behind collagen filled lips. A copper glazed ceramic cup sat by his till, half filled with the remnants of a cold, watery americano. ‘Ker-ching’, the till popped & the cash drawer like a jack-in-a-box, flew open. The horn rimmed man dropped the queens nose into the till, silver jangling against the other coins.
The sound stopped me in my tracks. Reminded me of corner shops & 20p mixes, hours spent on bookshop floors, moth eggs grooved into the pile of antique musky carpets in tiny seaside villages off the coast of Yorkshire. Something in the exchange felt different. The difference was disorientating. Disorientating because for a moment, I took stock of how rare such encounters are. How rare it feels for things to feel real.
I walked out of the shop onto the street. Mind straddling two worlds. Part of me didn’t want to leave, wanted to turn back and sit on the dirty carpet, in the musky air with the thoughts of writers long dead, wanted to turn back to comfort, to the abundant offering of nostalgia & certainty. Solid edges. Tangible objects I could reach out & touch, smell, interact with in real life. The shop felt human. The man felt human. This place felt like a sanctuary of normalness amongst the hoards of pristine shiny window displays & grey clad coffee shops.
I continued walking back to my sisters house, ‘The Homeless Mind’ protected under my wing.
What constitutes real? Big question. I wrote to myself, nursing the disorientation of the previous encounter with a strong Yorkshire Tea. I started to think of Baudrillard and Zizek. Bateson. Haraway. Critical theories bubbled up & unravelled. I pushed them to one side. I tried again. What constitutes real to me, to the soft animal of me? Touch. I wrote. Not on a laptop. But, in a dogeared moss coloured Moleskin I was bought for Christmas. One of the many journals that have moved from house to house since I was 8 years old.
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