Bookstore Therapy

Have you ever been in a bookstore and just wanted to cry? Not, necessarily, because anything is the matter at that exact moment, but just because it seems like a good idea at the time. My therapist says it's a good idea to let our emotions out instead of keeping them locked-up tight, so what better place to let loose than a bookstore?

Of course, the problem then becomes that everyone and their middle-school kid want to know what's wrong… so I simply suspected I'd have to find something to cry about before doing so, just so as not to make the already-a-scene too awkward for the average book-buyer. Could you just imagine? "Why are you crying, Ma'am?" "I don't know…" Like, shoot me now.

However, then there is also the aftermath to consider, if you are any sort of decent person that is. How am I affecting these people's lives? What sort of story will they go home with after a trip to Barnes & Nobel, intending on just picking up their child's summer reading copy of Wuthering Heights, turned into an impromptu consolation session of a complete stranger in the Fiction Literature section?

Well, I supposed it would have to be something I was already passionately concerned about, but not something so heavy as to ruin everyone's day with the depressing weight of it. If you're going to have a basket case in a bookstore, you should be careful to only have one.

So, for this particular practice of "expressing my feelings" I chose to cry over a subject that I was equally disturbed by as passionate about.

It was there, in the Art section, where I flipped through a copy of How to Draw Comics and focused on a suitable passage of text to get the emotionally charged fluids flowing. Before long I might have appeared inconsolable and a woman, who was coming from the Christian Inspirational section (just my luck), came over with a distressed look on her face and a hanky in hand.

"My goodness dear, what's wrong?!" she asked. She looked very kind and I wanted to say something but at this point I was, as stated before, inconsolable.

A few more people came over to crowd the small aisle and ask what the matter was, if I was okay, so on and so forth… the woman didn't know and asked if something in the book I was holding had upset me. I let out an absolutely pitiful sound and nodded my head as best my shaken nerves would allow without causing me to fall over.

The woman looked around, her eyes pleading for someone to help and one person, a manager I think (poor guy), asked what was wrong with the book.

"Th-the text," I cried.

"The text? What about the text dear?" the woman asked, probably glad that it seemed we were getting somewhere.

"It… it's all in Comic Sans! All of it!" deep breath here, "But it's just so appropriate!" with that weight finally off my chest, I collapsed on the floor in a sobbing mess.

My therapist was right, letting stuff like that out did feel great afterwards.