The Story That Will Never Be Written

Imagine a library bigger than any you have ever seen, bigger than the Library of Congress. It is filled with so many books no one has ever tried to count them. But it doesn’t matter how many books are in this library because people don’t go there much, and it is usually empty. Every once-in-a-while someone will stumble through the doors by accident, not quite sure how they got there, and stay only long enough to take one book off the shelf, flip through its pages, and return it to its place.  No one has ever read any of the books from these shelves, but even if someone were to try, it would be impossible.

Every page in every book in this library is blank.

Such a place exists. Figuratively, but it exists. I know this, because I’ve been there. In fact, I was there today.

The last thing I remember before suddenly finding myself in the library, I was sitting on my bed looking through a photo album. I had paused at a photo of my late Great Aunt Lettie and was trying to remember what was going on in the captured scene.

In the photo, we are sitting around a table at another relative’s house in New Jersey, and Aunt Lettie is entertaining everyone with one of my brother Eddie’s puppets. 

I remember we were all laughing so hard our sides hurt and some of us had tears in our eyes.

Eddie loves puppets and is always doing skits with them, so when Aunt Lettie started fooling around with the puppet that day, some of us started encouraging her to write a skit for him to practice with his puppets at home. She loved the idea, and promised to work on it and send it to him in the mail. Almost every time we saw her or talked to her after that, she would mention the puppet skit, and say she would be sending it soon.

It never came.

She died before she could write it.

I hadn’t thought about that day or the puppet skit in a long time until I looked at that photo. And that was then when I looked up to find myself in the library.

When I arrived, I saw a book on the shelf in front of me that seemed to stick out just a little further than the others, which were lined up perfectly even with each other. It seemed to be calling out for me to pick it up, but somehow I couldn’t. I don’t know how, but I knew, like in a dream, that this book was Aunt Lettie’s puppet skit.

I selected a different book from a nearby shelf and began flipping through its blank pages, but immediately wished I hadn’t. Just like I’d known the identity of the other one without touching it, I knew this one the second I opened it. I thought of Tom O’Hara, a man who used to live down the street from us.

“Mr. O.,” as I called him, was an extremely talented yet unknown photographer, and would capture the image of a flower as small as my fingertip and then have it printed the largest poster size available. He also took beautiful pictures of the many old barns around the area where I live.

On several occasions, he offered to show me how to use his camera and teach me about photography. I always said yes, I’d love that, and I think we made plans a few times to start, but we never got around to it. I kept saying I’d come over one day soon, but was always busy with other things, so it would get put off again.

He died a couple years ago, and now that will never happen.

I knew as I flipped through the pages of the book that this was its story.

Again, although figurative, this library exists, and every book on its shelves is a story that was intended to be written, but never was and never will be.

The purpose of the library, however, is not for its guests to be reminded of and have them dwell on their unwritten stories that will never be, but to encourage them to take note of their unwritten stories that still can be, and finish them.

Just as everyone has past regrets, everyone has potential future regrets and unwritten stories that threaten to end up in the library with the others.

What are yours?