I like being on the 6th Floor, way up high. A scenic view of Indianapolis wraps around the entire level, suspended in this grand view. The light always has a glint up here, ricocheting off the Scottish Rite Cathedral, or emphasizing the green of the round treetops. Birds of all sizes fly above, whirling in flocks or flying solo next to voluptuous clouds. Looking out from the reference desk, the Sales Force tower stands amidst a concentration of buildings; JW Marriot, off in the distance, and in the industrial horizon is the Monument Circle statue, forever saluting the sky.
While I was opening on the 6th floor this morning, turning on the catalog computers and public computers, walking the circumference which runs along the elegant exterior windows, I remembered my dream. I remembered that I had a dream of this very library when I was in middle school. This flickering reminder always has a way of arriving without notice. It always feels like an estranged icon of my weathered past, like an anchor pitched against the tides of a rickety ship.
In my dream, it is night. A rip in space opens and suddenly comes out my foot, then my body, and soon I am standing in mid-air in front of the building that I didn’t know then was Central Library. I am observing the rectangular window design sectioning off the glass facade. I can’t figure out exactly what I am looking at. But I see the other me in one of the rectangles inside, standing next to the window. That me is facing East, possibly on the 5th Floor, wearing glasses, looking like a businesswoman. It is a clear impression of me, like a copy of myself—a more mature version of myself—in another time and place.
And then, the rip in the sky closed. I woke up, back as a youth in my bed in Janesville, Wisconsin, in the house that I had inhabited during my elementary and middle school years. Back with my mentally ill, adopted Filipino brother and adoptive white-Midwestern parents that I’d lived with since I was two, since I was born in the Philippines, orphaned in poverty in 1985 and then adopted by them. Their house in Wisconsin had a grassy backyard where I'd lay at night, staring wide-eyed at the stars, wondering about parallel universes. That backyard rolled down into a nature preserve, where I practiced film photography in the summers, and built tree forts with my friends.
Now here I am, as a librarian in my late thirties, living in Indianapolis of all cities. Now in the Midwest on my own, I work at a downtown public library and reside in a historic luxury apartment with a chubby, tabby cat named Pualani, a sweet cat that I adopted from O’ahu where I had disappeared into endless days of immortal, sandy beaches before moving to Indianapolis. Somehow the winds called me to this place, to this world. It was in the garden a few years after I started working at Central, while staring up at its windows and noticing the rectangular sections, when I realized why I was feeling a sense of deja vu. When the realization struck, I felt some kind of a link inside me merge.
While I was driving to work today, I drove past a lone sneaker discarded in the middle of the road on Fall Creek Parkway. I wanted to record that sneaker’s description and whereabouts, for no particular reason, maybe to capture the artifact within the fleeting June scenery.
I wanted to write this essay.
Stephanie Maru
Birds of Yesterday, Dreams of Tomorrow
While I was writing, I drank coffee from a cup that read “Sparrow Coffee” on the front of it. Around the cup was a black background with caramel calligraphic lines flowing into the shape of a bird. The sparrow reminded me of a phrase that my colleague discovered two days ago on this floor. She was at the time inspecting free copyrighted old-fashioned plate art from the 1500s and spotted a Latin phrase inscribed on an art piece that she liked. We sat together at this desk in the last hour of my shift and she read aloud: “A swallow does not make a summer.” We both researched its meaning at the desk.
The next day, which was yesterday, Friday, I stayed home and hid from the world. As the day tip-toed onwards, I was able to unearth a modern-day understanding of that very Latin phrase, from breaking away from my own summer swallow that day, making sure no holes and cracks were left in a good-bye text I wrote for any kind of hope to emerge. I threw away the key to any possibility for good. And that key, or in this case it was an earring actually, ended up having a bird etching on it too.
I had stored the delicate earring in a pocket of the beige pants I was wearing the next morning, which was this morning. I brought it out with my slender fingers and chucked it straight into the mouth of my apartment’s dumpster before work. It landed at the bottom of the metal container with a little clunk. A chuckle arose in my lungs. I shook my head at myself because it was a dramatic gesture that would make no sense to anyone watching. No one could know the other earring was left at his house weeks ago. That this incomplete set of jewelry had unexpectedly shapeshifted into a moment of freedom.
Today, I finished this essay down in my cubicle on the sublevel staff floor. All that is left is yesterday, and all that awaits is tomorrow. What lives is this ever-reaching present like the monument that one can always view on the 6th floor. The statue is withstanding and eternal like my dream, existing as a symbol or momento, like the sparrow on my coffee cup, the swallow in the medieval art, the bird etched on my earring, the shoe lying in the middle of the road—all whispering of times that rip, times that clash, and times that eventually move on as seamlessly as an opaque sky