Ryden Oneshots

Love In A Letterbox

Ryan goes to the library at the same time every Tuesday. It's the little one in town, opposite the coffee shop and down the road from the movie theatre. It's small, not overly busy, and is the perfect escape from the busy, hectic life of the outside world. It may not be glamorous, but it has everything you could ever want to find in there. Ryan's never not found a book he wants. And he's often found quite a few he didn't know be wanted.

Greta, the receptionist who works at the desk during the weekdays, knows him well by now. They always exchange polite words and a smile when he checks out and returns his books, and she always recommends the one she's currently reading (mostly behind the desk when she's meant to be working) or warns him to stay away if she doesn't think it's to his taste. Ryan wonders what she thinks his taste is; he sure as hell doesn't know.

Greta smiles at him as he walks past, and he returns it - a small quirk of lips, noticable enough to be polite, but not enthusiastic to count for anything else. She goes back to her chosen novel of the week (The Great Gatsby, Ryan thinks he can discern from the bent-back spine) and Ryan makes his way into the depths of the library.

He's always found a sanctuary in books, a protection almost. A world of your own where no one else can change things you don't want to be changed. Reading gives you the allusion of control in your life, and then you realize that it's just an illusion. You have no input on where the story twists and turns and takes you next - it's all up to the storyteller. Gods of their own worlds.

There's a power in words, Ryan's always found. A power that seems alluring and dangerous and intriguing all at once - the rights words in the right order, the right emphasis at the right time, the right amount of clarity and the right amount of veiled speculation. It all boils down to the writer's power over their reader.

Words are some of the most powerful weapons, reading the most dangerous occupation. Everything always starts with words. Ryan passes the children's section and remembers how influential you are at that age. You trust everything, and even if you don't, you'd still believe anything. Reading is possibly the most influential aspect of a child's life. Ryan rolls his eyes at himself. Very Freudian, he's sure. But the point still stands.

But Ryan grew up and became skeptical and stopped trusting everything and believing anything. But he still loves to read. Ryan's always found that for him, the greatest feeling in the world is stumbling across something, just a singular line in a sea of black printed text, that holds an idea, or a suggestion, or even just a way of phrasing words in a sentence, that makes Ryan feel this person knows exactly how his mind works, because that line is just something he agrees with so completely. It just needs to be a line that feels special, directed to him, that he wants to keep secret and all to himself. And it feels like a comforting embrace, a protective blanket, or just the hand of a childhood best friend.

Ryan wanders through the city of books now, not knowing what he's looking for really, but knowing he's looking for something. It always starts like this, just wandering aimlessly until something catches his eye or he picks a letter of an author's surname amd grabs the most colourful book on that shelf. Ryan just loves going into the library and looking for anything, being surprised, finding an unexpected gem. Some authors' names deserve to be shouted from the rooftops, and yet hardly anyone's ever heard of them. Ryan finds it sad.

He's running a thin finger along the dusty spines of old volumes in the seclusion of the back aisles of the library when his hand stops running along a shelf and falls into a small space between bookshelves. It's a gap between one row of books and another, a little filler-space where the carpenter had obviously got the measurements wrong. It's about the size of a small shoebox; an irregularity within miles of shelving. And as Ryan's hand falls inside it as he brushes part, his fingers touch the spine of a relatively thin book hidden inside the small cubby hole.