The Library Beneath the Lake

📖 Story:

Beneath the lake that remembers, there is a library.

Not built, but dreamt.

It doesn't appear on maps. It isn’t spoken of aloud.

It waits, like sleep. Like the sigh of someone you almost remember.

The stairs appear only at dusk—

Transparent glass rippling in rhythm with your footsteps,

Calling you downward through layers of time-stained light.

Each step hums with the names of forgotten lullabies.

The deeper you go, the softer the world becomes.

When I descend, I hold my breath—not from fear,

But reverence.

The water never touches me.

It parts, kind as old hands drawing back a curtain.

𓆝𓆟𓆞𓆜𓇼𓆡

The library sits at the center of the lake’s oldest dream.

Its walls shimmer with liquid silver, woven from reflections—

Of faces I’ve lost, of mornings that smelled like warm toast and soft laughter,

Of the way my mother’s voice used to echo in the kitchen when she thought no one was listening.

Books float freely, unchained.

Some drift lazily, others dart like minnows, pages rustling in curiosity.

Each book holds one memory. Not mine alone, but ours—

The world's stitched-together soul.

There’s the volume of First Joy:A child’s hand grasping a father’s finger, sticky with jelly.

There’s the poem of Last Goodbye:A window that never reopened, and the rain that followed.

I search for my own, fingers trailing through warm water-light.

Then I see it—my book.

Thin as a secret, glowing faintly blue.

It flutters to me like a startled bird.

I open it with both hands.

✦﹒✧﹒✦

The first page breathes.

I'm five again, chasing a soap bubble through a sunlit backyard.

I remember the giggle that escaped me when it popped on my nose.

I didn’t know sadness then—only sky.

Flip.

I'm twelve, hiding in the school library,

Wishing I could vanish into the pages of a dragon book.

The librarian didn’t speak.

She just slid me a cookie and let me be.

Flip.

Seventeen. A kiss under neon. It tasted like root beer and hope.

I don’t remember the name, but I remember the warmth.

We believed the world would never end.

Of course, it did.

Flip.

Grief.

My father’s chair. Empty, but still making space.

I sat there once. Cried into its arms.

It held me like it remembered.

✦﹒✧﹒✦

I close the book slowly.

Tears don’t fall here. They simply dissolve, returned to the water.

Everything here is sacred. Even the pain.

A librarian glides toward me.

Not a person exactly—more like a silhouette of starlight in the shape of a friend.

She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to.

Her presence says, Take what you need. Leave what you must.

So I breathe into my book—

One new memory: Today.

The coolness of descending. The quiet awe of being seen.

The book glows gently, content.

It swims away to rejoin the shelves of the soul.

𓏸𓍊𓋼𓍊𓏸

Above me, the moon waits, rippling across the surface of the lake.

My glass staircase appears again, slowly forming in reverse.

I ascend.

With every step, I rise carrying a lightness,

Like something old inside me has been rinsed clean.

The wind kisses my cheeks at the surface.

Night has fully fallen.

The stars blink knowingly.

I walk the lake’s edge slowly, toes in the dew-wet grass.

The silence follows me home, gentle and whole.

Back in bed, I close my eyes.

But not to sleep.

To remember.

Not every library needs shelves.

Some are made of water, of time, of soft knowing.

And beneath the lake that remembers,

My story waits—always—

Ready to read me again.