The Lost Bookshop

by Evie Woods

Opaline’s Bookshop was a magnet for little boys and girls.

He always said that books were more than words on paper; they were portals to other places, other lives. I fell in love with books and the vast worlds they held inside,

It was their pride or my future and I could not, would not, sacrifice myself on the altar of their expectations.

That’s what was making me miserable: the hoping. I realised then that I would have to give up one or the other, happiness or hope.

I came across a bookshop called ‘Shakespeare and Company’.

Shakespeare and Company was a fascinating place to be. The shop itself had the quiet warmth of all bookshops, with dark wooden shelves worn soft over the years and that unmistakable scent of paper and leather.

walked into what she thought was our house. But when she got inside, she realised that it was a bookshop – a small, old-fashioned little place, full of charming old books and knick-knacks. Anyway, she came back out on to the street, turned around and poof! The shop was gone and there was my front door again.

He wasn’t to know it, but I had fallen in love with him like falling down a flight of stairs, and it hurt every bit as much.

The human heart does not weigh these cold facts. It sees hope in the impossible, love where perhaps there is only desire. It acts without rhyme or reason.

‘He used to say that he would like people to open this door in the way they would open a book, entering a world beyond their imaginings.’

Where the lines in the wall had been, there now emerged a shelf. With one single book on it. Standing upright.

Yet it struck me that being a woman was akin to a performance, with its cues and lines that had to be learned. I knew how I was supposed to act and what I was supposed to say, I just wasn’t exactly sure if I wanted to.

I was choosing not to register for college because I was too scared. What I hadn’t realised was that I was actively choosing to stay stuck where I was, which scared me even more.

The past and the present were colliding in the front room and no one seemed to understand how terrifying that was.

As if I was trying to prove a point, or punish her (or myself), I sleepwalked into my marriage like stepping out into oncoming traffic. And I had no one to blame but myself.

I wished the shop could close in around us and keep us safe, keep the world outside. I wished we could hide within these walls for ever.

I had fallen in love with him and no one knew better than I what a risk that was. I couldn’t – wouldn’t – let that happen again.

He had become a monster in my eyes, but here he was, all human, and it took everything I had not to weep for everything we’d lost; beat his chest and tell him how much it hurt to lose him.

All of my life I’ve been searching for hidden treasure, fortunes outside of myself. But Martha, she found them in me.

An angry man was dominant. An angry woman, on the other hand, must have lost her grip on sanity.

The female sex was a curio for them; something to be studied but not understood. A nuisance to be controlled.

I knew how to deal with dull. But when you’ve had a taste of magic, it’s hard to be satisfied with the ordinary again.

Conformity is a death sentence. No, my dear, you must embrace what makes you stand out. That’s what they despise.

Little by little, I returned to myself. Bruised but still intact – and that was more than some.

There is an energy here that can transform into anything it wants. It has remained hidden from all except the true believers, a tiny seed that still contains all that it once was and can be again.

‘The thing about books,’ she said, ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.’