A boy comes into the semi-closed-off section named the “Marcia and Sanford Jaffe Teen Center” within the library limping. He has a wide black cast on his left leg and a hoodie covering his darkened shame. His eyes tremble. The gleam of them are like waning crescent moons nearly disappearing.

He plops down onto the purple pillow-plush chair rimmed with a cool silvery metal. I look up at him from a little white table where I sit with many of my belongings spread across as if owning the whole table myself. He returns a warm glance as if to whimper, “Help me.”

Sorry. I have to write, so in my notebook, I keep observing like a madman as I record his miseries. I do not dare speak to him and after a long period of him looking down at something on the high table by which he sat, he finally limps away past the bright orange-brown wooden shelves containing DVD’s around into checkout, where he disappeared behind some bookshelves which prevented me from seeing him. He was gone.

I feel quite disappointed with myself for my lack of interaction with the lonely boy, so I figure I will try to show a friendly gesture to another fellow citizen in the library. After this decision, a six-five high father leads his young son of possibly two to three into the enclosure. The boy’s near white-blond hair blends with his pale skin.

“No!” he shouts sternly a couple of times when his father tries tempting him to rest on the worn beanbags in the big kid section.

I smile at the young boy and the father, expecting an exchange, but the father, after trying to entice his son, finally gives up. He leaves noticing my smile, but perhaps, he was too embarrassed. He quickly turns away shamefully.

I finally give up trying to interact with others and focus purely on my writing describing what I see when I notice a girl wearing a gray shirt written with “Patriette JR Cheerleaders.”

I think, perhaps she goes to my school at Parkway South High, but then I realize the “JR” in the name likely indicates that she is a middle schooler.

She sets aside a book on the blue beanbag as the light of her phone burns out the whites of her eyes. Her legs move like a swimmer doing butterfly kicks.

She arises and departs forgetting her book which is now alone on the sunken sullen beanbag, but remembers her phone.

The middle-school aged girl returns with her brother who has the book “Big Nate: In a Class by Himself”. He sits down struggling as he contorts his figure in various ways kicking, lowering and raising his feet and turning to the right, the left, and flat on his belly.

Again, the girl decides to depart and says to her brother in what she believed to be a secretive whisper, “Watch my stuff.”

Maybe she was sure I would be interested in taking her things since I was paying close attention to every detail around me while people-watching in a public library.

The brother responded, “Okay,” but he was too absorbed in his book to really watch anything that could have gone wrong. His hands were holding up his face as each individual finger poked into his fleshy cheek. Later, his sister returned, but I lost interest in them as they stayed to themselves and barely even talked to each other.

After my interest is lost and my eyes just roll around carelessly to find something, I notice a familiar face appearing in the library’s checkout... uh-oh. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to a library where people I know tend to go…
Ian, after an abrupt unexpected sighting, comes into the teen section of the library with a quick awkward nervous smile. He meets a younger mirror of himself.

His mirror was a much less weathered version of him: browner and smoother hair (as opposed to his brother’s ruffled curls), purer cream white skin and little brown glasses. He holds the hand of his younger brother and leads. They walk as if trying not to break a paper bridge. He doesn’t bother to look at me anymore. He barely even spoke to me, except for a faint “hey.”

I continue writing as I myself begin to feel more isolated within the library. Library commoners like myself may come here their whole lives but barely speak to one another. This is especially true with the librarians now that library goers are separated from humanity by computer catalogues and self-checkouts.

A young, possibly college-age librarian with a thin and tall figure, loose coarse black hair reaching a bit below her shoulders and light sandy skin, wears goggle-glasses with her feet criss-crossing past shelves all about the library floor. She wears a short see-through flowery shirt with a almost unnoticeable tinge of yellow worn over a normal white t-shirt and she wears slack-like jeans. She carries a load of three to four books before departing to place them elsewhere and returns to get more.

She seems solely intent on the location to where she will take the books, but she does not necessarily seem to anticipate interaction with anyone. She is in a world of her own.

I remember a time when the librarian and I  had a bit more interaction when she said, “The library is closing at nine o’clock.” This time I would not be staying that long, so even that would go unsaid.

Later in my stay at the library just before my mother arrives to bring me home, a beautiful thing occurs. A young girl with baby black braids curled about her head zooms afar flapping the wings she imagines ought to be there as she spreads smiles all throughout the library.

No more do I see her, so I think perhaps she really believed so much she went over a cliff, but my insane brutally creative mind finally is brought to its senses when I realize that she is the most interactive in the library as she spread one essential message: the library is still a place where we need to spread our wings and smiles despite the common boundaries we add to the rule of being quiet as if it suggests our voices and our interactions are to be quiet. We need to allow our worlds to bleed together even if it means a little smile, for we are separated so much it has become strange in some cases to even smile at one another.
As I prepare to leave, I write it, allowing a smile to form on my face.