The Weight of Unread Pages

Eleanor’s knuckles were white, pressing down on the spine of a leather-bound folio. The scent of old paper, of decaying glue and trapped air, was a familiar balm, a quiet shield against the clamor of a world she often found too loud. Here, in the hush of the Bodleian’s Upper Reading Room, the only sounds were the soft scrape of a chair, the rustle of a turning page, the occasional muted cough that felt like a sacrilege. Sunlight, strained through the high, arched windows, laid dusty paths across the polished wood tables and the ancient tomes. She was tracing the lineage of a minor Tudor baron, a man long dead and forgotten by most, but in these quiet hours, he felt more immediate than the man sitting three feet away.

Arthur cleared his throat. A small sound, but it echoed. She didn’t look up. He’d been trying for twenty minutes, first with a query about the peculiar binding of an illuminated manuscript, then a comment on the chill in the room, now just a dry, rasping noise. He watched the way her dark hair, threaded with silver now, fell over her face, how a stray strand caught the light. Her focus was absolute, impenetrable. It always had been, since their days in grad school, poring over texts in the campus library, then, only then, did her gaze soften, shift, find his. Now, it just stayed locked on the page.

He sighed, barely audible above the whispers of the other scholars, but loud enough in the cavernous silence that it felt like a shout. He ran a thumb over the rough edge of a vellum page, a collection of forgotten sonnets. Once, he’d written her a sonnet, a clumsy thing, but she’d kept it, tucked into her worn copy of Chaucer. He wondered if it was still there, or if it had been lost to a charity shop box during one of their moves, just another casualty of time and unspoken neglect. The thought snagged in his throat, dry and bitter.

Eleanor felt his eyes on her, a weight more substantial than the folio. It wasn’t a comforting gaze anymore. It was an expectation, a silent accusation. He wanted her to engage, to banter, to be the woman who once debated the merits of obscure poets with him into the small hours, fueled by cheap coffee and an impossible love. But that woman felt like a character in a book she’d read long ago, a stranger now. The words on the page, the meticulously cataloged facts, offered a simpler, cleaner order than the messy, unpredictable script of their life together.

“Find anything interesting?” Arthur finally asked, his voice low, careful, an attempt at levity that landed flat. He leaned forward slightly, resting his chin on his fist. His eyes, once quick with humor, seemed heavier now, lined with a weariness that matched her own.

“The usual,” she murmured, without looking up. “More documents suggesting the baron was likely involved in land disputes rather than the court intrigues popular history attributes to him.” She paused, then, as if realizing she owed him more. “His wife, a Lady Margaret, was quite the fierce one. Wrote letters, scathing things, to her husband’s rivals. Quite remarkable for the time.”

Arthur grunted. “Sounds familiar.” He watched for a reaction, a flicker of understanding, a shared smile that used to pass between them with a look. Nothing. Just the slow, deliberate turn of another page. The air between them thickened, dusty and stagnant. He remembered a time, years back, when a comment like that would have sparked a laugh, or at least a knowing glance, a quiet acknowledgement of their own marital squabbles, quickly forgotten. Now it just hung there, a ghost of a jest.

He picked up a small, slim volume, a collection of local folk tales. He opened it at random, scanning the text. His finger stopped on a phrase, ‘…and the silence grew between them, not empty, but filled with all the things they could not bear to say.’ He felt a cold knot tighten in his gut. This library, this quiet, it didn't just preserve history, it amplified it, echoed the things they’d buried. He watched Eleanor’s intense profile, the slight frown between her brows, the way her lips moved almost imperceptibly as she read. She was so close, yet light years away.

“Remember that trip to Siena?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper, a violation in the quiet, but he couldn’t stop it. “That tiny pizzeria, the one down the alley, where we watched the rain fall and talked about what we’d name our kids?” He didn't look at her, just kept his gaze fixed on the old tale, his thumb still on that resonant line.

Eleanor’s hand faltered on the page. The baron’s land disputes vanished. She saw the cobblestones slick with rain, the steam rising from their cheap pizza, Arthur’s eyes, bright and full of a future they’d both believed in. A sharp, unexpected pang. The quiet of the library suddenly felt suffocating, not comforting. She closed her eyes for a brief, aching moment. When she opened them, Arthur was still looking at the book, his shoulders slightly hunched. She felt the heavy weight of all the words unsaid, all the futures unlived, all the pages they'd never gotten around to reading together, stacking up between them, an impenetrable wall in the heart of all that knowledge. She slowly, very slowly, pushed her own heavy folio to one side of the table, just a fraction.