The library was her nesting place. There was a musty, bookish smell attached to libraries: her second skin. She lugged her heavy bag up the stairs, step by step and approached a table with etchings all over it. Etchings made up of initials with no identities to match, S.C & A.F = 4ever and others which tried to strike a comic value, anal is in Constitutional law. She would make occasional glances at the people around her but dared not stare. She always wondered what lives they lead and what they were searching for in their lives. As she rested her chin on the palm of her hand, she gazed out at the city with its monolithic bloc of skyscrapers. It was sort of funny she thought, to think that this brilliant view was covered with years and years of dust which the students treated as just another wall; too busy to ponder its worth while chatting amongst their peers.
Suddenly, her table too was filled with friends old and new and simultaneously, she felt the distance grow. Their voices were soft, crashing waves you could hear in seashells. She had felt this way before, the feeling of being abandoned. It wasn't until her adolescent years she realised that this fear parasitically lived inside her. She had always been a dreamer with a shadow that never quite followed her. Her friends were ambitious and strove to build new lives, throttling away into the future while she stared at the dust-speckled window. She was the type of girl to swipe her finger against the window and examine the dust. Considering all the minute particles with her magnifying glass, listening to all their stories about couples in dark corners.
She could never really see the big picture. When she finally did see it, her friends were the ones waving from the city and towards the library. Without noticing, they all had left and she was the one still dreaming.
