This is something I wrote for my creative writing classes and I’m incredibly proud of it. I thought I ought to share it for you all as a sort of pledge for 2012 that I will be writing more.

There is a small bookshop tucked away on the street of E. Abada. Two of the four walls are lined with dark wood shelves that reach from ceiling to floor, filled with books. Most of them are wrapped in plastic, pristine and untouched but some have cracked spines and are yellowed, not with age but constant exposure to the sun. There are striped armchairs next to a few of the shelves, the floor is laid with tinted parquet tiles and there are tables displaying vintage items beside the counter with the ancient cash register.

This is not the place I grew up in.

My father inherited the bookshop from my grandparents when they retired and went home to our house in Baler. My grandfather was a lover of the written word and after sending his four children to school on a teacher’s salary, he used what money he saved up to put up a small bookshop near the school he taught at. I suppose I would have inherited it when it was my parents’ turn to retire but they sold the shop after a fire broke out, destroying almost everything inside. That was five years ago. I was twenty years old.

These days, I hang around the shop, helping out when I can. The new owners liked the idea of having a hole-in-the-wall bookshop despite the downward spiral that was the publishing industry. The vintage paraphernalia is a homage to my grandfather, they said. They are an odd couple but with money to spend on unprofitable investments. I’m grateful to them for keeping the shop alive though.

There aren’t a lot of people who go to bookshops anymore. When I was younger, all I had were these books. I had no playmates because there weren’t many children in the compound and I had no siblings either. Books became my best friends. It helped, of course, that I was in the shop all the time. I either inherited this love for books or by mere osmosis, the words were burned on to my skin and declared its love for me, pleading that I love them back.

“Excuse me, do you have a copy of Plato’s Symposium?”  asks a boy. He looks about twenty and a student, judging from the lanyard he’s got tied around the belt loops of his jeans. Not that many people read Symposium on a whim these days. He appears to be speaking to me. He looks like the few children I saw at the compound, chinky-eyed and with whiter skin than mine.

“Hello? Can you help me out here?” he says. There is no one manning the cash register again. The new cashier is fond of smoking up in the staff room. The staff changes every so often; none of them stay longer than six months. It’s haunted, they claim. There are noises, even in the day. It is too cold in some areas, even though the aircon is off. I can never remember their names.

I lead him over to the classics section that’s barely touched, even on good days. There’s only one copy, wrapped up in plastic that’s covered with dust. I have never been too fond of the classics. But I do remember having to read The Symposium for my history class once. I like the whole bit with Aristophanes the most.

“There you go,” I say to him. He picks it up with just his forefinger and thumb, mindful of all the dust. He wrinkles his nose a little and his glasses move upwards and then slide down his face with the motion.

When he has the book in his hand, he looks at me expectantly. “I don’t actually work here, you know.”

“I am so sorry.” He looks mortified but really, I don’t mind so much. It’s been a while since anyone here at the shop has spoken to me or even looked my way. I have always been a quiet child. I would have liked to work in a library, I think. Nobody really bothers the librarian. I enjoyed watching students’ faces light up with understanding whenever our librarian sent them to the right direction as if she were a magician conjuring up a bunny or a dove at a child’s birthday party.

Three weeks later, they put up a “Help Wanted” sign on the window.

I am surprised when the boy comes back a few months later in the early days of summer. He still has the lanyard with his ID looped around his belt but his skin is sun-kissed and he has a wooden arrowhead hanging from a string on his neck.  He comes in with another boy who was taller than him and looks through the shelves. The boy gives me a sheepish smile before looking away quickly heading toward the cashier. This one has been working at the shop for about three months. She is thinking of quitting and hangs the “Wanted” sign when the owners are not around.

He asks about the job opening and her eyes brighten as she hands him the application form the owners bought from National Bookstore in Katipunan. He fills it up and hands it to her, asking all about the job and if it’s possible to just do it for the summer.

I see the boy again on his second week at work. His name is Joseph Dy, he tells me. Most people call him Joe. He’d heard about this place from his best friend’s mother. Apparently she knew the owners. He’s deathly allergic to shellfish and once almost died because his friend mistook a lobster ball as a cheese ball during one of their shabu-shabu dinners. Joe is a senior at the Ateneo, majoring in Management and minoring in Literature. His parents do not know that this second bit is more because he loves to read than it is for law school. He practices his dancing in the late afternoon and de-stresses with an hour or two on the Xbox.

I think Joe and I are becoming friends. We spend most of the day talking. He tells me about his crushes and how one day he would stop thinking about their race and just ask one of them out. Maybe. Eventually he stops talking about them altogether. In return, I tell him which books are best for reading when the days are long and the heat is unbearable or when it’s rainy and too cold outside. His favourite author is a toss up between Murakami and Vonnegut. I prefer Gaiman myself.

We don’t always talk though. Sometimes Joe picks up one of the unwrapped books and reads them on the chair nearest the counter while I stay on one of the chairs nearer the back. Most days we just sit next to each other and listen to the music on his iTouch. Whenever a Chinese song starts playing, I make him translate the lyrics. It’s adorable, watching him struggle with words he can’t remember the exact translation for. His eyes pinch up and disappear when he’s thinking hard about it. His dimples appear when he remembers but by then the line has changed and he stumbles to catch up with the song. I can’t remember the last time I laughed before him.

More people come into the store than usual but most of them are Joe’s friends, there to keep him company during their breaks. I don’t talk to them, they don’t talk to me and I am perfectly okay with this. I like it better when it’s just Joe and me in the store but I understand that he has other friends. There are days when I’m sure Joe does not realize I’m there and he tells his friends of this person he sees in the shop who recommends all these new books. I’m pretty certain the shop’s sales have never soared this high. It makes me smile when Joe talks about me.

Two weeks before he’s scheduled to go back to school and quit his job, it’s a Thursday and Joe is wearing a bow tie.

“You look like a waiter,” I tell him. He frowns at me and I can’t help but grin at him.

“Waiters don’t wear bowties in colour,” he says after a moment. I shrug at him and turn back to my book of the day, Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“If you say so.” His shoulders slump a little as he walks over to the counter where he takes his seat and pulls out his iTouch. He puts it down and I can hear the first strains of “Ang Huling El Bimbo.” Joe never uses his earphones these days. He says the music adds to the mood. Despite the anachronism, this song has always reminded me of this bookshop.

He walks over to me and sits on the floor next to the chair, craning his neck to see my book. Maria dos Prazeres has entered the car on her way back home from the cemetery. I turn the page.

“I have a question.”

“Hm?”

“Do you ever wonder if –“ he starts but I can barely hear him. He is whispering. If I could see his hands, they might have been shaking. I lean over the armrest so I can hear him and my arm brushes his scalp. He pulls away quickly. “Wow, your skin is cold.”

This comes as no surprise to me. What does catch me off guard is the tension in the air. There is a feeling in my chest that hasn’t been there in a very long time. “What did you want to ask me?”

“I…Would you like to go out with me?” Joe is looking down at the floor when he says this but he looks up at me right after he speaks. In the background, Ely sings about how his Paraluman-esque paramour died in a hit and run.

“I would like to.” Joe’s eyes light up. “But I can’t.” It would be easy to go back to this book or maybe just even disappear. He’ll only be here for a couple more weeks and then he’ll be gone and I won’t even have to remember. But I know how much this means to him, how much of his courage he balled up to ask this of me.

He moves up from his seat on the floor and back to the counter. His shoulders are slumped even further. I am pretty sure I have never felt this terrible. It is only 10:30 in the morning. It wouldn’t be the first time for him to ignore me, but it’s different now that he knows he’s doing it.

“Why are you still here?” he asks me sounding like the petulant child he seemed like when I first saw him.

I can’t leave, I tell him. I can’t ever leave this place. He looks like he doesn’t believe me. Why should he? And so I tell him. I tell him about the fire five years ago. How I fell asleep in the shop without unplugging all the Christmas lights that early evening, while waiting for my father to pick me up. How the fire began by the glass windows at the front of the shop. How I only woke up when the heat of the flames was too much for me and I was coughing from all the smoke. How stupid I was to think I could save the money in the cash register. How one moment I could still breathe air and the next my lungs were filling up with smoke and no matter how much I inhaled, all I could get was smoke and ash from the books I loved. How the next thing I knew was waking up to my mother’s sobs my father staring at the wasteland of their livelihood. I tell him how I have been trapped in this shop for the past five years because I have nowhere else to go, because all I have left are these books around me.

He stares at me and it is clear that he has no idea what to say. I have never tried walking through walls before but it feels good to know I can.

I don’t show myself to Joe for the rest of his stint at the shop. I don’t move objects, and I try to stay as far away from him or whoever comes by the shop. He doesn’t appear to be looking for me either; although it is perfectly clear to him that I can’t be anywhere else but here. It’s not hiding, really. Not if this is what’s good for him.

If there’s one thing I learned about Joe this summer it’s that he’s full of surprises. On his second to the last day at work, when the afternoon light is streaming in through the glass windows, Joe walks around the shop. He shuffles his feet and it looks like he’s trying cover every inch of the floor. He pauses every so often and looks around. It takes me a moment to realize he’s looking for me.

“I could let you do that all day and you’d never find me.”

He looks at me and there is so much intensity in his expression. In another life, I could have reached over and taken his hand to reassure him. I could have wrapped my arms around him and tell him that it’s okay; we can go out another time. But in another life, we wouldn’t have even gotten to this point. My parents would still own this shop, and I would still be running it. In another life, none of this would have happened.