The Library of Shadows

by Rachel Moore

Alone carved out a canyon in her chest, deep grooves of a river run dry. She didn’t know how to fill it back up. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to, just for it to empty again.

There is life, there is death, and there is love—the greatest of these is love.

She learned how to say goodbye over and over again. It was so much easier than holding on too long. She’d seen what heartbreak could do.

For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

There is life, there is death, and there is love.’” Somehow, Este knew what would come next. “‘The greatest of these is love,’” they finished together.

“When you love someone, it’s like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as the day they were written. All the years and memories are still right here, cataloged inside us.”

Could it be enough if all they ever had was almost—almost touches, almost together, almost real?

Maybe sepia-toned nostalgia was its own type of haunting. The ache of missing something you could never have again.

“I don’t want to know another life without you in it.”

Este smiled when she said yes. She kissed him, warm and sweet and soft, and she’d keep kissing him until their hair grayed, until their skin wrinkled, until dust gathered on the bookshelves. Eventually, they’d become nothing more than sun-faded ink, a final line in her favorite story, one she was no longer afraid to write.