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Unwritten

A book without a story and a story waiting to be written.

By Jeff SpiteriPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Photo by Ayman Yusuf on Unsplash

The black book was dark as the night. It was a void of sorts. End to end capped with a color so solid you could stare through it to the other side. It was filled with empty white pages. These contrasted the darkness that encapsulated them; however, they too were a part of the void creating the space and time from beginning to end. One look at this book and one might ask himself, “how could such contrasting colors be one and the same? How could they be a part of and create the same entity?” This book, in all of its contrast and completeness, was after all, still unwritten. Capped from end to end with the unknown and filled with blank pages. It sat alone in a dusty old bookshop waiting to be discovered.

The shop was on an old street in a small town. The town, once a quiet seaside getaway, had seen many faces move through its streets and, although time had lapsed giving way to new buildings, businesses and people,the quaint shop stayed motionless. Time simply passed by the shop while it held the memories, wishes, dreams, and lives of its stories within its walls from book end to book end.

The bookkeeper had discovered the black book one day, and it puzzled him. “Whoever heard of an empty book?” he thought to himself. Pages of blank white capped end to end with two black leather covers. It was a bit of a paradox, the shop owner thought. Aside he had tossed it amongst the piles of old dusty novels stacked on a center table surrounded by bookshelves. The shop was too cluttered to move through comfortably, and the bookkeeper, with so much work looming around him, gave himself no more time to think of what purpose this book could have. Generations upon generations of his family had passed down this shop and slowly it had accumulated quite a collection. But with each generation of bookkeeper came a growing inventory; consumed with the legacy of books that had been passed down and abandoned to him through his family, the man became lost in its maze. Time stood still within the shop, walls lined with the old stories and books he’d inherited from generations before him. Over time, the shop had slowly become dwarfed by the ever burgeoning change of the surrounding world, and so had his life in the maze of overwhelm the cluttered shop created inside him. The business, barely hanging on, only made enough money to stay afloat, and the bookkeeper had resigned himself in exhaustion to keep one step ahead of this all-consuming cycle.

In the summertime, the doors of the shop remained ajar. This tradition had been a welcoming mark of the warmer weather and one he greatly looked forward to. The open doors on either side of the shop allowed the wind to breathe life into its old musty mazes and caverns. Stirring from its memories the stagnance in the air, and allowing the sunlight to penetrate the darker corners of the space. In its heyday the shop had served the citizens of the small town, with its damp seaside winds that would clash with the surrounding hills and create tiny gayles that moved through the alleys.

Lost in its legacy, the shop’s once prominent space now stood awash in the grey backdrop as port industry and business changed, leaving the bookkeeper behind to lose color in between the pages of the dusty old shop he fought so hard to maintain.

The book, however, tossed aside, held a certain light within the space. A presence not permeated by the inescapable accumulation of imposed stories like the other books and the histories they held. For days it lay on the stacks and volumes of the center table, but now since its discovery the black void of its cover slowly began to eat at the shop owners' curiosity. The white pages were not like anything the shop had seen before; clean, open, fresh and alive just like the summer winds that blew through the shop. Vestiges of his childhood when everything was new and possibilities were endless. It’s dark cover reminded him of those warm and special summertime nights he spent as a child with his mother well past bedtime in their backyard watching the stars light up in between that big black void.

It was too much for him to bear. The wind and the book, had all brought about something screaming from the void inside him. His memories and his purpose sat stagnant everywhere around him. The shop he invested so much time into, that he had made his life, now felt grey and drab as he looked at the book that reminded him of the emptiness he felt inside.

He could not stand to hold the book any longer. To see the finiteness of himself, the possibilities and the space that lay on either side of him. At once, in a confused and scared fury, he lurched to the door and thrust the black book between the myriad of older worn texts at the end of the display cart outside. The man went back inside, shutting the door in haste and disrupting the breezeway through the shop, causing a mess of pages and dust to swirl and tear filling the air. He began to cough, hacking on the latent particles that filled his throat. Gasping, he realized that, for the first time in ages, he had felt something other than the drudgery of his day-to-day existence. Slowly he picked up the pages and began to sweep up the dust. As he looked around he started to question the books around him, lying there on the table and lining the shelves gilded ornate leather covers. What purpose did they have? Sitting on shelves gathering dust as he toiled, day in and day out, to sell them? For what? To do it all over again? The thought troubled him, but he soon put it out of his head. Some hours passed and not a soul walked through the shop. Finally, as the sun was reaching its bright descent into the orange evening, a boy walked in. The man, startled, looked up from the counter where, once again, he had found himself going over bills and numbers, The boy had a look in his eyes, a glint of light, of life, that contrasted brightly with the drab grey of the dusty old shop. In his hand the boy was holding the black book,its dark cover piercing the clutter and congestion in the room's hazy evening light. The man, stunned, asked the boy what he was doing with the black book. The boy told the man he had seen it while walking by even though he had never really noticed the shop before. “It was mesmerizing,” he told the man.

At first the boy had held it in his hands puzzled, “What does one do with an empty book?” he asked himself. And, while stumped over its purpose, the boy's curiosity became lost; the black space of his pupils became transfixed through the cover and he was sucked into a time that he had known not so long ago. The boy was at the age where others’ stories were beginning to be given to him and to pile up, but something deep within knew these pages well. Promptly he had opened the door to the store and walked in. That was when the bewildered shop owner knew. He looked at the boy, glowing with anticipation, and the bright black sheen of the book's vacant cover. He put down his pen and stepped out from behind the counter. Slowly he approached the boy and asked him with genuine curiosity, “why of all books did you want this blank, empty one?” The boy quietly but confidently spoke, “It is my story sir, the story of my life that is unwritten.” The bookkeeper was awestruck with a realization that he had known deep down in his soul but never had the courage to speak to. The bookkeeper nodded with a look of understanding. He said to the boy, “all my life I’ve run this shop, peddling books passed down through generations in my family, living amongst their stories, and now I find this empty book and you wish to buy it?” The boy spoke again “This is not just a book sir, it is the unending story from which we came and to which we are going, the pages are our only ‘now’ and we must decide how they are written. Our paths did not cross today so that our stories would remain separate. This book is ours.” The man, with great gratitude, began to weep tears of grief and redemption. The boy had given him a gift, a new perspective on a life he had resigned himself to, living through and for someone else, fading into the backdrop of a changing landscape. The boy noticed the paper on which the bookkeeper had been scribbling and asked with a pointed curiosity, “What were you doing behind the counter before I came in?” The Shopowner stopped sobbing and looked up, “I, I was running my numbers for the shop, I have been slowly falling behind on my bills and have gone into debt. I do not know how I will keep my doors open.” The boy felt sorry for the bookkeeper. Then, behind the old man at the far wall of the shop, the boy noticed another book glinting in the fading sunlight. The old man turned, following the boy’s gaze, to see an old book of poetry on a table in the corner. It lay open, its magnificent gold-edged pages rested still. A family heirloom passed down through generations. The wind had blown it open when he shut the shop door earlier. The book was magnificent - he wondered why he had never noticed it- but now before his very eyes the opened page was alive with beautifully printed text. The bookkeeper read it silently.

“I long for the day to remember,

Calling you in like a dream.

Where future and past break with the present,

And clear eyes glisten in there teary morning dew

Where all perils and fables have fallen,

To find me within finding you.

Where story and magic are unbound and brazen,

Departing past where colors fade,

To find the day I know my heart more deeper in this picture frame

And live beyond its dull reflection standing in this window pane.

For what lay on the other side,

A deeper wisdom I may know

And through the weeds that I have pulled

A higher resonance now grows”

As the man read the text, the boy stepped aside to the counter the bookkeeper had been standing behind. On the paper he saw the numbers the bookkeeper had been hunched over figuring. There in the corner of the page, circled, was written -$10,000. The boy's heart sank for the man. There was no way the shopkeeper could make up such a difference, his business was already barely hanging on, there was no more market for any of these dusty ancient leather- bound books. At that moment, the boy heard a gasp from the corner where the old man was standing. His eyes were wide as he turned towards the boy, in his hand a letter. It was a will. The man turned slowly, reading under his breath. It had been tucked into the pages of the text all this time, waiting to be discovered. The will stated a bequeathment of $20,000.00 to the closest living relative and heir of the family bookstore.The boy looked at the man with a sense of knowing and acknowledgement. The storekeeper now had a story to write.

humanity
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About the Creator

Jeff Spiteri

Jeff Spiteri is a writer and creative. With a working back ground in Mental Health and Substance Abuse. His writings reflect on his personal experiences with early childhood, adolescent and adult traumas.

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