I finally stopped putting the books back where they belonged.
After a month of agony, hair-ripping frustration and piles of text in forms of rotting debris, I finally just let it go. Mr. Winderman, the insane old man who ran the wretched shop, chuckled softly as I threw my hands up, waving the white flag of surrender.

“So you’re actually going to stop trying now?” he asked amusedly, popping his head over a maple bookshelf. He was carrying yet another stack of books, a mish mosh of paperback novels and thousand-page textbooks. “I’m telling you, Julian, it’s an organized mess. I know exactly where everything is. You don’t have to compartmentalize everything so psychoanalytically.”

I shrugged, not verbally admitting he had a point. As crazy as Mr. W was, he always had a point. Since the start of July, I’d been working in this little bookstore, or the “book nook,” as he liked to call it. The only one in the small town where I lived, I had nothing better to do, so I took the job. And if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that bespectacled old men with graying hair are a kind of esoteric species no person, especially a seventeen year old, could ever really understand.

“It’s already six pm,” I glanced at the grandfather clock he had nudged in a corner. “I’ll see you around, sir.” And with that, I took my leave. I could see him waving pleasantly in my peripheral vision.

Evening summer in Arizona is always an arid experience, with dry wind shaking up the landscape, leaving trees quivering and actual tumbleweed tumbling. The sun was low in the sky, injecting ripples of purple and red, before its inevitable descent. I passed through downtown Glendale and arrived in the residential areas, taking my time, mid-summer lazy style.

Every house looked the same. As if a construction worker made one plan, and duplicated that by a thousand. Rows of shrubbery stood before every house like green sentinels, there was one tree per house. Standing at the front of my street, if I squinted and looked down, all I could see were copies, until the whole road vanished into the sunset. That was my street. That was my town - homogeneous, uniform, orderly.

That was my whole life.

In a small town, or in this one, at least, our lives were written down before we could even pop out of our mothers’ wombs. We’d go to elementary school, then middle, get to high school, where we’d all know each other (each grade being about a hundred kids), and then we’d probably all go the same state university since the tuition is dirt cheap and then we’d settle back here, and begin the next generation of mailmen, shop owners, butchers, etc. Walking down the formulaic avenue, it was all too easy to see. Predictable. Clean-cut. Whether I even had a decision to leave this place, was arguable.

And maybe that’s why when I first entered Mr. Winderman’s shop; my whole body just rejected it. Messy, sloppy, disheveled, and most of all, disorganized. Piles upon piles of books on different genres and topics blended together, bookshelves on the verge of tilting over. Nothing made sense. Nothing was calculable. I remembered his sheepish grin but unapologetic voice: “Don’t even try to organize it.”

The weird thing was, it was kind of beautiful, in its own incomprehensible way. It was almost thrilling, being in a state of confusion, stretching my legs away from orderly to touch upon chaos. But my innate urge to just clean it all up, to keep it simple, to stay in my comfort zone – it won. So I ignored his advice.

I tried.
I failed.

And as the sun finally set behind me as I keyed my way through my front door, I wondered if there was a reason behind that. Knowing Mr. Winderman, there probably was. I could already picture him, pushing his musty glasses further up his nose, musing quietly to himself.