Liquidity

I'm crying right now.  It's the second time I've cried since I found out about all of this.  The first time was Friday, when I found out I wasn't going to get any kind of severance.  Those were angry tears.  This time, though, I'm having actual weak-chin-water-streaming-down-my-face tears.

I want to stay positive, but it's very hard right now.  I'm sorry if this is going to depress anyone to read, but I think I just need to write it down so I don't have to hold it in.  It will probably be very personal, but I can't help it.

Yesterday was the worst day of my working life.  It was a day of hundred-deep lines.  It was a day where you couldn't pick up the stacks of recovery (code word for Shit Other People Can't Be Bothered to Put Away) before you found another six stacks.  It was a day where I told a good friend of mine that I felt like I was running the whole damn place by myself, only to have him say simply, "Because you are."  I had to hold it together for a staff of underpaid, definitely unappreciated people, and though there was a time or two where I definitely didn't act as professionally as I could have - and definitely not as professionally as I should have - I did my job.  I spent my lunch break talking on the phone to a fellow manager who had the good luck to be off and he had to remind me that there is no reason to stress out anymore.   I just need to keep punching a clock until this is all over.

The real reason I'm crying, though, is not about the loss of the store or my job.  It's about the loss of that rarified, wonderful thing that working in bookstores since I was seventeen gave me: the relationships.

I'm sure that I'll keep in touch with people, but it won't be the same as walking in and seeing them every day.  I'll make new friends wherever I'll end up, but I don't see ever finding myself working in a place where practically every person I meet has at least one shared interest: the love of reading.

I met my best friend, the man of honor at my wedding, at a bookstore.  We didn't like each other at first, because we were both way too outspoken and full of it back then (altogether now: back then?), but then we realized that we had an almost perfect ability to speak our minds to one another without fear and an almost uncanny shared love of the same things in pop culture.

I met someone who is among my oldest, longest-lasting friends at a bookstore.  He is my literary soulmate, someone who I have never lived in the same city with for longer than three months but who I've shared more with than just about anyone.  The fact that he and I are still in close contact almost a decade after we first became friends gives me hope for the friends I'm about to lose daily contact with.

I met a writer who makes me laugh and who gets weirdly - and probably only jokingly - scandalized by my comments at a bookstore.  If I didn't have coffee dates with her every week or two, I'd never get anything written these days.

I met a fellow book nerd, a person who makes me eternally optimistic about my ability to read Ulysses one day, at a book store.  To him I say this: our staff pick endcaps are already empty, even at just 20% off.  That proves that we have good choices and that there are people out there who value our thoughts.  We did everything we could, sir.  Keep up the fight.

And I met my husband, my favorite person in the world, at a bookstore.  If I didn't have him to come home to right now, and if I didn't have him to clean up the apartment unprovoked so I would have a day to do nothing but cry and write cover letters, I don't know how I would make it through this.

There are others - so many others - who I will miss seeing every day.  On Friday I played what I called a Fantasy Draft of People We'll Never Have to Talk to Again with a few of these friends.  We laughed so hard I almost peed my pants, just making me realize that I need to have another fantasy draft where I list all those that I'll miss oh so much.

I'm still crying.  Damn it.