Deliverance

After just over 12 months in my 'new' home, i have finally got round to unpacking my books.
A lack of shelving has been my excuse.
I took them out of their boxes and dusted each one off carefully; then i carried them into the house and put them where the shelving will (sometime) be. After i had unpacked around eight boxes, i realised that the piles were not the size that they should have been. Somewhere beneath all that other stuff there was another box languishing, 'a-mouldrin' in the garage.
I pictured the book that i wanted, it was the one that i had used for my masters dissertation.

I rang the bookshop to see if they had anything by Sophie Calle. The lady said that there was little in print of her work at that time. There was one book that was actually a catalogue from a retrospective at the Museum of Tel-Aviv. Amazingly, a copy had been ordered to this store and had never been picked up by the customer. I convinced her to let me have the copy; it was the most i have ever spent on a book.

After much rearranging of heavy boxes i found the culprit, at the bottom of a large pile. I knew as soon as i opened it- that damp smell, the carcasses of woodlice. The box was sooty and soft and the worst affected volume was my precious museum catalogue. I have rescued it though. The damage is mainly to the cover, so it is still readable.

I can feel a change in the air. A vaguely detectable sense that things are soon going to be different. My eyes feel wider open, my senses sharper, and i feel like i am indeed the sum of all my experiences.