The written loom

Dear Stranger,

The pain had become almost poetic in its intensity..
An epic kind of toothache, pulsing in my ear, blurring my vision, pressing against the deepest part of me, as if the whole world had condensed its weight upon a single tooth..

I wasn’t sure if I was crying or if my eyelashes had simply melted from the Athenian heat..

Somehow, or maybe it was the pain leading me, I found myself in front of an old bookshop. The kind with heavy wooden shelves, rows like quiet archives of memory. I recognized the editions. They’d been around since 1951..

I wasn’t in search of literature..
>I needed… something with roots.,
Something that holds meaning tightly in its hands..
>I needed dictionaries..

“Where are your dictionaries?” I asked.

They pointed, further in. Deeper. Quietly waiting.

That’s when everything changed.

Maybe it was the exhaustion, the heat, or my peculiar sensitivity to language, but I felt them pulling me in. Not the books. The words.
They were calling..

I walked between spines like walking between doorways. And one, a worn blue hardback, seemed to pulse with something alive..

The moment I touched it, the world spun..

It was no longer a shelf.. It was an entrance..

I was inside the dictionary..

And the words — oh, the words — they caught me..
I danced with bookbinder, sang softly to livre, whispered λόγος and ερμηνεία, waltzed with Sprache, and spiraled through calligraphy.

I reached for my bag, trying to find my reading glasses, to see more clearly, but the words beat me to it..
They took the bag.. They took the glasses.. And then… they grew.. They grew big enough so I could see them without help..

They wanted to be felt, not simply read..

And somewhere in that printed dimension, I saw a familiar face, an interpreter, a friend, one of those who loves language as I do. He began breaking down the root of a word, and I didn’t know whether I heard him or if the pages themselves were speaking.. Books opened before me..  not just dictionaries.. Encyclopedias, atlases, dream books..

I wandered..
>I forgot the pain..
>I forgot time..

Until .. A voice snapped me gently from the spiral..

“The dictionary you asked for… it’s quite worn,” the shopkeeper said..
“It was in storage for years. We never thought anyone would want it again.”

That’s when I realized, I hadn’t been dreaming..
I was holding it..
The 1972 edition..
Its pages had already spoken to me..
I remembered the CORPUS entry, how they fed five million words into a machine, block by block, to build a world we could eventually read..

Before leaving the shop, I tilted my head and leaned in close..

The dictionary whispered to me:

“I am not a tool.. I am a world.. Don’t forget me.. Because within me, you are written too.”

With ink and silence,
– Me,