Curiouser and Curiouser: Lost in the Library

The coffee’s still warm.

I blink once, twice.

Refocus…

The label reads Drink Me.

I eye it suspiciously, because we both know where this ends.

The hour floats somewhere between dreaming and awake.

Somewhere in my memory a photocopier hums like an accomplice, and the shadows between the shelves whisper like old friends with bad ideas.

Still, here I am.

Curiouser. And curiouser.

Following the breadcrumbs,

chasing the ghosts, collating the fragments.

Because maybe, just maybe, this time the lost stories will let themselves be found.

Welcome to Late Night Musings

with Rogues  & Scoundrels

The old library met my senses with a thump,

old wood and older paper.

It wasn’t meant to be an adventure.

But then again, what is?

I had come to the collection room with a plan.

A list.

Titles circled.

Spines to find.

Voices to rescue.

I told myself it was an excavation.

I told myself it was work.

But somewhere, between the shelves,

between the echoes of a clock that might’ve stopped decades ago, I lost the map.

Or maybe I folded it away on purpose.

Because here’s the thing: a library like this…

it’s not just a place.

It’s a threshold.

The key to a forgotten world.

A liminal space where stories don’t just sit quietly waiting for you, they reach out.

They stir.

They beckon with crooked fingers and half-remembered phrases.

They whisper in languages you’ve forgotten you knew.

Enticed, I walked further.

Deeper.

Past the well-lit tables and into the darker corners, where books huddle close together like conspirators.

And in that moment, I wasn’t a researcher.

I wasn’t a writer.

I was Alice.

Curiouser and curiouser.

The shelves loomed above me,

impossibly tall, impossibly wide,

like the towering trunks of a forest

I didn’t know how to navigate.

I craned my neck.

The titles blurred.

My footsteps softened.

The world outside faded.

And I let it.

Because sometimes, you need to be swallowed whole.

Sometimes, you need to vanish into the belly of the archive, to forget your deadlines,

your outlines, your page counts, and simply wander with your thoughts and your feet.

There’s something holy about losing yourself in a library.

Something reckless, too.

A library holds more than books.

It holds memory.

It could hold every photograph ever taken,

even the ones no one developed.

It holds the ghosts of voices that dared to say I was here.

It holds the stories we tried to forget, and the ones that forgot us back.

So, beneath the flicker of a solitary bulb,

I set to work.

The photocopier hummed, steady and stubborn, feeding each fragile page beneath its lid like an offering.

I watched as the light slid across the glass, over ink faded by time, over typefaces long out of print.

Page by page, I rescued them.

Lost short stories.

I skim my eyes over the words, words I know well from a voice I can still hear so vividly. Emotions stir, the sacred voicemail stored safely in my phone.

My portal back.

Each copy I made felt like a small defiance.

A refusal to let these words disappear.

I stacked them carefully.

Straightened the edges.

Collated by hand, fingertips brushing paper worn soft by a hundred quiet readings.

There was something almost reverent in it,

this slow, deliberate stitching of fragments into something whole again.

And I realised: this anthology, It’s not just a collection of words.

It’s an active rescue mission.

It’s a hand reaching back into the dark.

It’s stitching a thread through all the fragments left behind.

It’s saying: these voices mattered.

They still do.

I sat for a while, beneath a window that let in just enough light to feel like hope.

I rested my hand on a book whose spine had cracked open with age.

And I felt it, in my bones, how stories can outlive the storytellers.

How words can be maps, even when they lead you in circles.

And I thought of all the stories waiting to be found.

All the ones waiting to be told.

And I stayed.

Even after the work was done.

Still, here I am.

Curious. Lost. Found.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Stay tuned.