The Library

by Bella Osborne

Many a time she’d needed somewhere safe and quiet to run to and the library had never let her down.

She often thought about all the times in her life when she had wished for more time and now here she was with oodles of the stuff stretching out before her like it had all been saved up and paid with interest when she needed it least.

reading helped ease the lack of human contact. Most of all Maggie missed the hugs. It was a peculiar quirk of polite modern society that without a partner or offspring in your life you were denied that one key comfort that humans require – the need for physical contact. An embrace can be on many different levels but the basic sensation of emotional and physical warmth given freely by another is most noticeable when it is no longer there.

If she’d realised the last time she was hugged was significant she would have paid more attention, committed it to memory so she could recall the sensations at will for the

many times since, when all she had needed had been for so...

it was the happy memories she had of the library that kept her company. The times she’d gone there when she literally had nowhere else to go.

She’d sought peace at the library, and it had given her exactly that along with multiple worlds to hide herself in. She could disappear into a book and be gone from the harsh reality of the real world for hours. That had saved her. Saved her from herself and most likely a much shorter life.

‘We often think of the oddest, most irrelevant things, at difficult times. We seek out the little things we can cope with while we process the things we can’t.’

‘Friends aren’t merely the tumbleweed of faces that roll in and out of your life. Friends are the ones you connect with and who last a lifetime. You’ll pass a million people on your path and just a few will be worth spending time with.’

Didn’t enjoy him as he should but how many parents were exactly the same? Too busy with their day-to-day lives

to

realise the most ...

times would soon be a distant memory. Children were a gift but a transitory one. Mess things up and they were gone. Even if you did your job right you’d lose them in the end. Not quite so permanently but surely the measur...

Books are such an underrated essential. Every book is a key that unlocks another world, leads us down the path of a different

life and offers the chance to explore an unexpected adventure. Every one is a gift of either knowledge, entertainment or pure escapism and goodness knows we all need that from time to time.