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I was the owner of a bookstore for twenty-three years, which is a sentence that sounds like the beginning of a eulogy, which is appropriate, because the bookstore is dead now, and I am the one who killed it. Not with malice, not with neglect, but with the slow, quiet inevitability of a world that stopped needing the things I had to sell. I opened The Turning Page in 1999, when I was twenty-eight and full of the kind of certainty that only comes from not knowing what you’re doing. I’d inherited a small amount of money from my grandmother, enough to put a down payment on a storefront in a neighborhood that was cheap because no one wanted to be there yet, and I’d filled it with books I loved and a cat that showed up one day and never left and the kind of hope that makes you believe that if you build something with your own hands, people will come. They did come, for a while. They came for the readings and the children’s story hour and the quiet afternoons when the light came through the front window and the whole world seemed to slow down to the speed of a page turning. They came for the recommendations I gave them, the books I pressed into their hands with the certainty of someone who knew that a book could change a life, because a book had changed mine.
But the world changed. It changed the way worlds do, not with a bang but with a shift, a slow tilt away from the things that had mattered and toward the things that were faster, cheaper, easier. The neighborhood changed too, got younger and richer and less interested in the kind of books I sold. The rent went up. The customers went online. The readings got smaller, the story hours got quieter, the afternoons when the light came through the front window got lonelier. I watched it happen, the way you watch something you love fade, knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it, knowing that the only thing worse than letting it go is holding on to something that’s already gone.
I was fifty-one when I closed the doors for the last time. It was a Tuesday in November, the kind of gray day that makes everything look like a photograph from a time you can’t quite remember. I’d spent the morning packing the last of the books into boxes, the books that hadn’t sold, the books that had been on the shelves for years, the books that had been waiting for someone to pick them up and take them home. The cat, a gray tabby named Eliot who’d been with me for fifteen years, sat on the counter and watched me work, the way cats watch when they know something you don’t want to admit. I put the last box in my car, the one I’d bought with the money from a good year, a year when I thought the store might make it, a year that felt like a lifetime ago. I stood on the sidewalk, the door locked behind me, the sign I’d painted myself still hanging above the window, and I didn’t cry. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, in the gray light, watching the afternoon turn to evening, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing happened. The street was empty. The neighborhood had moved on. The bookstore was closed, and I was standing outside it, a man without a store, without a purpose, without the thing that had held his life together for twenty-three years. I got in my car and drove home, to the apartment I’d rented when I opened the store, the apartment I’d never left because I’d put everything I had into the store and there was nothing left for anything else. I sat on the couch, the same couch I’d had for twenty-three years, the one with the sag in the middle and the stain on the arm where I’d spilled coffee during a reading, the one that had held me and the cat and the stack of books I was reading, night after night, year after year. Eliot jumped up beside me, curled into the sag, and went to sleep. I sat there, in the dark, and I tried to figure out who I was without the store. I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. I tried to figure out how to be a person who wasn’t a bookseller, and I couldn’t. I’d been a bookseller for twenty-three years. I didn’t know how to be anything else.
That night, I did something I’d never done before. I opened my laptop, the same laptop I’d used to order books and manage inventory and send out the weekly newsletter that fewer and fewer people opened every year, and I searched for something I’d never searched for. I’d never gambled. Not once. I’d spent my life in the world of books, a world of certainty and predictability, where a story had a beginning, a middle, and an end, where the good guys won and the bad guys lost and everything made sense in the end. I knew that the real world wasn’t like that. I knew that the real world was full of uncertainty and loss and the slow, quiet death of things you loved. But I’d never put money on it. I’d never bet on something I couldn’t control. I’d never let the ball fall where it might.
But that night, sitting in the apartment where I’d lived for twenty-three years, with the cat asleep on the couch and the bookstore closed and the life I’d built gone, I decided to let go. I decided to put something on the line, just to see what would happen. I found a site that looked legitimate. I found the Vavada gaming platform, and I sat there for a long time, my hands on the keyboard, thinking about the store, thinking about the books, thinking about the twenty-three years I’d spent believing that if I just kept going, kept holding on, kept turning the pages, things would work out in the end. I deposited a hundred dollars, which was nothing compared to what I’d lost, everything compared to the man I’d been.
I started with blackjack, because blackjack felt like something I could understand, something with rules and strategies and the illusion of control. I played carefully, the way I’d run the store, the way I’d lived my life, making the safe bets, taking the safe risks, always holding something back in case things went wrong. I lost fifty dollars in about twenty minutes. I lost another twenty. I was down to thirty dollars, and I was about to close the laptop when I saw a game I hadn’t noticed before. A slot machine with a library theme, shelves of books and reading lamps and a soundtrack that sounded like the quiet hum of a place where people came to find something they didn’t know they were looking for. I stared at it for a long time, the little graphic of the shelves, the books that lined the screen, the lamp that flickered like a candle in a window. I thought about the store. I thought about the afternoons when the light came through the front window and the whole world slowed down to the speed of a page turning. I thought about the books I’d pressed into people’s hands, the books that had changed their lives, the books that had changed mine.
I put thirty dollars in the library slot. I watched the reels spin, watched the books turn, watched the lamp flicker, and I didn’t care if I won or lost. I was there, in that moment, in my apartment, with the cat asleep beside me and the store closed behind me, doing something I’d never done before, something that was just for me, something I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to do. The reels stopped. The screen flashed. And then the shelves filled with light, and the balance on my screen started climbing. Free spins. Multipliers. A number that went up and up and didn’t stop. When it finally did, I was sitting on the couch with my laptop open, staring at a balance of just over twelve thousand dollars.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I sat there for a long time, and then I withdrew the money, all of it, and I closed the laptop and lay back on the couch and stared at the ceiling and felt something I hadn’t felt in years. Not relief, exactly, but something closer to possibility. The store was gone. The life I’d built was gone. But I was still here. I was still a person who loved books, who believed in the power of a story, who knew that a book could change a life because a book had changed mine. And now I had twelve thousand dollars, which wasn’t enough to open another store, wasn’t enough to fix the past, wasn’t enough to undo any of the things that had happened. But it was enough to start something new.
I used the money to start a small press. Not a bookstore, not the kind of place where people come to buy books, but the kind of place where books are made. I publish the books that the big publishers won’t take, the books that don’t fit into the categories, the books that need to exist even if no one knows they need them. I publish poetry and essays and the kind of fiction that doesn’t sell but matters. I publish the books I would have pressed into people’s hands at the store, the books I believed in, the books that I knew could change a life. It’s not the same as the store. It’s not the same as the afternoons when the light came through the front window and the whole world slowed down to the speed of a page turning. But it’s something. It’s a way of keeping the thing I loved alive, even when the world has moved on.
I still have the account. I still play, sometimes, on nights when I’m sitting in my apartment, the cat on the couch, a stack of manuscripts on the table, the quiet hum of a life that’s different now but still mine. I find the Vavada gaming platform that I discovered that night, and I play a few hands of blackjack or spin the roulette wheel a few times. I don’t play to win. I play to remember that night, the night I lost eighty dollars and found something I didn’t know I was looking for. I play to remind myself that the end of one thing is the beginning of another, that the books we close are the books that make room for the ones we haven’t opened yet, that the only way to keep something alive is to let it go and see what comes next. Eliot is still with me. He’s old now, older than any cat I’ve ever had, but he still curls into the sag on the couch, still watches me work, still knows something I don’t want to admit. He knows that the store is gone but the books are still here, that the life I built isn’t over, that the story I’m living is still being written, page by page, day by day, one small press at a time. I think about the library slot sometimes, the reels that spun and the books that turned and the light that filled the screen. I think about the twelve thousand dollars that turned into something I never expected, something that wasn’t a store but was still a place where books could live. I think about my grandmother, who left me the money to open the store, who believed in me before I believed in myself, who taught me that a book could change a life because a book had changed hers. I think about all the books I pressed into people’s hands, all the lives I touched, all the stories that are still out there, still being read, still changing people the way they changed me. And I think about the night I let go, the night I put thirty dollars on a library slot and watched the reels spin and found something I didn’t know I was looking for. The courage to start again. The willingness to let the old story end so the new one could begin.
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