“We yearn for ordinary days.

Days void of strife and tautly woven thoughts, and liberation.

Days unnumbered, unraveled, un—”

   Ewelina was sitting cross-legged on a mahogany armchair inside the New York Public Library’s reading room, book in one hand, head rested on the other. It was a somber day; rain rapped against the grand room’s arch windows like a distant whisper as the girl’s thoughts drifted from the poem she was scrutinizing, to what she would have for dinner, and how she would have to make it back to the train station without an umbrella after the one she had been using flew away on the short walk from the station to the library. It wasn’t uniquely unusual that rain pour on the streets of New York City for three days on end, after all, the city was in need of this sort of ritualistic cleansing that almost magically, seemed to take with it the grime of everyday life, leaving behind a varnish of hope – like rainbows after rain.

“G-d knows I need it too” she sighed imperceptibly; hot air evaporated slowly from her mouth as she tried not to arouse the attention of the people sitting around her. The girl looked up discreetly to assess her silent companions on such a dreadful evening. There was a middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair at the left end of her table. He looked to be engrossed in Dostoevsky – what exactly she couldn’t tell, for the book was worn, and its title had faded away. She couldn’t help but wonder if it made him any happier to undertake such an arduous feat, for the brief distraction literature offered was not enough to compel her to want to live. She thought about how subjective living was, take her own life for instance, from the outside in, it appeared so perfect. She landed what her younger self would have considered the job of her dreams as a product manager for one of the city’s biggest companies – and yet, she still felt that there was something amiss, something profoundly obscured, such that no matter how hard the girl tried to find it, she always seemed to miss it. It was almost like missing the sunrise, every single day of her life, she knew it was there, knew that it was real, still, her eyes had never confirmed its existence.

    Suddenly, conscious of how long she had been studying the man, Ewelina’s attention turned toward the steady click-clack of heels on the glossy concrete floor, the sound intensified as they moved closer and closer in her direction. Turning her gaze slightly, the girl’s eyes stopped on a mature looking woman with radiant caramel skin, setting a bulky leather-bound book Ewelina recognized as a Bible on the table, the woman proceeded to draw out the chair across from her with the grace and flair of a foreign princess. All the while, the girl feigned flipping through the pages of the book she had brought with her, careful not to burden the woman with her attention –

for New Yorkers were always so bothered by the slightest of stares, it was absurd, how one little look made people feel so, threatened. She threw a glance at the woman again and thought that her features looked familiar. Although, that was a very common thought to be had in as interconnected a city – she may have very well bumped into her on train or on her walk to the office. Still, the girl was certain she had never noticed the woman at the library in all her years of being a frequent visitor. This mammoth of a library, complete with four stories and multiple reading rooms, had been the one constant in her life throughout the years. The building had been there when she first started college and spent many sleepless nights cramming for exams, once she finally landed her ‘big-break’ job in marketing, and tonight, when all she needed was to feel invisible among a group of strangers. Ewelina felt curious enough to snatch another glance at the woman; upon doing so, the sun-spawn looked up and caught her gaze in what years later, Ewelina could only go on to describe as ‘an encounter of sheer transparency’. She felt an abrupt tug in her chest which caught her by surprise. Beyond the woman’s coffee-brown irises, Ewelina sensed a lifetime’s worth of hurt, cognizant that somehow, the woman could also see her. For a brief second, they were like two mirrors reflecting nothing but bare truth.

    The woman’s all-knowing eyes awoke discomfort in Ewelina who immediately fixed her attention back on her book of poems. For the next half hour, she fell slowly into the groove of reading, first not daring to look up, and later, forgetting about the stranger’s presence entirely.

“Shadows of yesterday

illuminate today, revealing todays

as compilations of yesterdays”

     Her mind felt like a whirlpool, coming more and more alive after every turn of the page –

it was in fact, with every turn of page that she felt closer and closer to that thing her life was missing. Ewelina’s trance broke when she felt a light tap on the front of her hand, startled, she looked up to see the stranger with the melodic heels shoving a beaming smile at her. Her mouth opened to speak but the woman beat her to it.

         “ello there dear, pardon me for interrupting your reading, ya seem quite invested in it.”  Something about the way the woman spoke made the girl wonder about her, the words she spoke were clearly enunciated and her accent resembled that of the people of Northern England – only that it wasn’t quite British, in fact, the girl couldn’t quite pinpoint where it was from, but she knew she had never heard it before and fought back the urge to ask the woman where it was that she came from. Ewelina smiled timidly, “Oh don’t worry about it Ma’am”, she swiped her hand in front of her face as if to indicate it wasn’t a big deal, “I was just about done here anyway!”

Looking back into the stranger’s eyes, Ewelina found that she had been ushered into the same baring spotlight she’d been in when they first locked eyes.

“Well, ma dear, I was wun’dring if you could direct me to the loos?” said the woman with one of the most genuine smiles she had ever seen.

“This is my first time visitin’ such a massive library and I tend to get lost easily an–”

“Oh.” the girl responded, little confused.

“Do you mean, the restrooms?”

“Ah, yes, I do forget that down ‘ere they’re called ‘restrooms’, pardon me dear!”

 “That’s alright, I guess you weren’t from here. And yes – about getting lost, I’m the same way!”

“We must be twins, eh?” added the stranger with a tease.

 “The bathroom is right outside past those doors”, Ewelina pointed toward the front of the room. She spoke carefully, “make a left, take the stairs up to the second floor, and the ladies’ room should be straight ahead.” The stranger stared into the girl’s eyes for a second and then smiled.

“I’m sorry sweetheart, I’m a bit of a mess when it comes to directions!” she let out a thunderous chuckle, “Would you mind guidin’ me there? Then I won’t bother you again, I promise!”

“No no no, I’m happy to help miss, just give me a moment to pack up my belongings and we can go” the girl shoved the book in her tote bag and motioned the woman to follow her.

    Outside the bathroom, Ewelina waited for the strange woman. She looked out the window adjacent the hallway. Seeing that it had stopped raining, the girl determined to catch the F line home as soon as she showed the stranger back to the reading room. Beads of water were gliding down the windowpane. They always reminded her of that tense car ride home following the doctor’s life-altering prognosis. She had lost her mother three days before her twelfth birthday and after that, things had only gone downhill; her father kicked her out of the house after she had come out to him, leaving her homeless – and without a family. Since that day twelve years ago, Ewelina had picked up her phone many times to call her childhood landline, assuming that her father still lived there, yet she always cleared the dial pad before clicking the last number. But Ewelina tried not to conjure up thoughts of her past, things were different now, and while she may not be happy, she was doing a hell of a job pretending to be.

     The bathroom door swung open and out came the woman with a sunlit smile on her face which Ewelina found impossible not to reciprocate.

         “You are a blessin’ dear!” she exclaimed while throwing her hands wide open at her sides. The girl still couldn’t ignore the feeling of recognition that washed over her whenever the woman smiled at her, she felt connected to her, and yet, she couldn’t entirely grasp whether it was a clever trick of the mind. She reasoned that it had been her eyes, of course! This high-spirited stranger possessed her mother’s somber eyes. That was it.

         “Cool. I’m glad I could help. So, uh, where did you say you were from again?” They walked steadily, making their way back down the stairs and turning right into the reading room. Ewelina awaited the woman’s response. There was none and figuring that the mature-looking woman had not heard her, she continued in silence.

         “I’m Whisper”, she extended her hand, “What’s your name?”

         “Whisper” the girl breathed out, shaking her hand and flinching almost immediately as the feel of and electric pulse pinched at the palm of her hand.

“Oh, are you alright my dear?” yelped the woman.

“I’m okay, it was just static.” Whisper, the girl repeated in her mind, simultaneously deciding that she had never met anyone by that name, but that she fancied its uncanniness.

“That is such a beautiful name. I’m Ewelina, pleasure to meet you, Whisper.”

   Without warning, Whisper stopped walking and turned to the girl with her mouth agape and face pale as if she had seen a living apparition.

         “Whisper, is everything alright?” the girl questioned

“Did I say something to offend you?”

     Whisper placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder, and once again the girl felt a shock rise to her neck.

“I’m going to tell you something Ewelina. And it’s going to sound absolutely bonkers, but I need you to hear me out dear.”

         “What is it?” the girl clung onto Whisper’s words, anticipating what it could be.

         “When we first tied the knot, around fifteen years ago, my husband and I decided we wanted to start a family. It only took a month of trying before we got a positive test result. We were over-the-top with joy. When we found out it was a boy, I remember Harold, my husband, got so excited. He yapped day and night of all the things, he would teach our little lad.” Whisper grabbed Ewelina’s hand and motioned her to a nearby chair. She continued, “Around the third month, I began cramping and soon there was bleeding. So, Harold drove me to the hospital, where the doctor delivered the new – I had miscarried.”

         “I am so sorry this happened to you Whisper” the girl jumped in sympathetically. Whisper affirmed her with a head nod and half smile, “it happened again a year later, they were both little lads.” Unable to speak, Ewelina took to nodding her head at the vulnerable woman.

         “Harold and I knew it was a possibility, after all, none of my siblings have been able to have kids to this day – we thought I’d be the exception.” Whisper’s staticky fingers cupped Ewelina’s hands in hers so that the two were staring at each other in the eyes as if reciting a prayer.

         “The third time, we found out it was a girl and lord did we pray for a different outcome.”

         “Please tell me she lived,” said the girl.

         “Sadly dear, she did not.”

“And we stopped attempting to have kids, realizing it was best to adopt.”

         “Now dear, the reason I burden you with all this is because unlike with our other little angels, my husband and I selected a name for her.

“And that name was the same as yours my dear, Ewelina.”

         Whisper looked deep into Ewelina’s eyes so that she could feel the woman’s tears trickling through her veins. “You are the daughter I was supposed to have. You are the girl I was supposed to see today. You have no idea how much I needed to see you Ewelina, I knew it from the second I walked into this room.”

     Warm tears brimmed in her eyes as she scanned Whisper like a laser for signs of truth. It was very much like Ewelina to trust people prematurely, she didn’t believe in coincidences, she was of the sentiment that if she could talk, so could everything around her.  The girl really did feel something connecting her to the mere stranger, she felt it so much that from between her lips burst out the words:

         “I needed you too, Mom.”

     Whisper’s arms outstretched wide, and Ewelina, whose mind was void of material thought, fell into the woman’s soul like a wounded bird. They consoled each other longer than the girl had hugged anyone since her mother’s death, standing there, arm in arm, until they sensed the presence of onlookers intruding upon their exchange.

         “I must be off now, dear” Whisper told her hastily, “but we’ll lend each other a hand, I promise.” Ewelina nodded while using the backs of her hands to wipe the tears from her eyes.

         “I’ll be in this room Fridays and Saturdays; promise me you’ll come see me dear and we’ll lend each other a hand”, the girl nodded, too overwhelmed to speak.

         “Meet me here next week, eh? ” Whisper walked toward the exit, looking back at Ewelina once having reached the room door, and smiling a tender goodbye.

     The girl thought about the peculiar encounter on the entire train ride back to the apartment she shared with her roommate and greatest friend Dani. She couldn’t help but curse herself for being so gullible; there was absolutely no way she could have been the miscarried child of a random stranger. It was all so preposterous. And then, what if it wasn’t? What if the woman she met could have been her mother; it would explain the inexplicable tie she felt between them, and besides, people share reincarnation stories online all the time – perhaps her soul rejected the life she would have lived as Whisper’s daughter, choosing to experience the life she is now living? Unexpectedly, almost like an inappropriate thought, Ewelina thought about another reason that would explain the unusual comfort she felt around Whisper – and that too was preposterous. No, it couldn’t be true, she must be crazy for entertaining the possibility that Whisper was indeed her mother, not her reincarnated mother, but her deceased mother, the one who in some obscured point in time, sung her Russian lullabies at night and woke her up in time for school.

    Jolted by the sound of her friend’s voice as she walked through the apartment door, Ewelina quickly shut down her theories, concluding that the most probable explanation was related to her crucifying naivety.

         “Well, if it isn’t little miss book worm…”

         “Hello there Dani, how was your day at the bar?”

         “Hey, hey, hey, that doesn’t matter right now...Where have you been girl? I’ve been texting you since lunch time, thought the library ate you or something” said Dani, clearly high on something.

         “I was at the library, and then the most insane thing happened”

         “What exciting things could possibly go on in a library? The last time I went to one I was nine and all I heard was silence.”

         “Well, it’s not entirely straightforward; why don’t we start sautéing some vegetables for dinner while I tell you?”

Dani agreed with a nonchalant “cool”.

   When Ewelina finished recounting the bizarre turn of events that had warped her day into confusion, Dani’s reaction was less than stellar.

         “So, you’re telling me, you called a random stranger MOM?” Dani reprimanded her.

         “I know, please don’t make me feel more embarrassed than I already am. I could have sworn to you Dani, I genuinely felt a bond between that stranger and I.”

         “Yeah, well, you know what my therapist says” replied Dani matter of factly.

         “What?”

         “Not all feelings mean something. Sometimes the brain tricks us into feeling or believing something that just isn’t true.”

         “I know” Ewelina exhaled as she rested her head on the arm of their couch. Except, Ewelina did not know, because this foreign inkling inside her trickled its way into every thought she had about Whisper, it convinced her that Whisper could indubitably be connected to her birth mother. Albeit, the idea may have sounded farfetched, still Ewelina knew better than to trust Dani’s lousy judgement – G-d knows she hadn’t spoken to her parents in over a year only because they refused to pay off the credit card bills, she had accumulated during her ‘gambling phase’ in college. Ewelina was the first to admit that she held a soft spot in her heart for Dani, they had been more than roommates, sisters even. But even she knew in her heart that she never wanted to be like Dani.

         “Look Ewe, all I want is for you to stay safe, for all you know that ‘very nice’ woman could be a psychopath or murderer trying to lure in her next victim” Ewelina let out a laugh and rolled her eyes.

         “I’m being serious Ewe; please promise me you won’t go back to that library.” Ewelina’s eyes widened with offense, “Dani, that’s my favorite reading room, where else am I supposed to go when you have people over?”

         “We live in New York City, there’s a library in every corner, find another one” Dani countered. “Say you promise Ewe”.

         “Alright, I promise not to go back to that library – in the next year.”
    Ewelina intended to keep her promise to Dani, so she found another public library branch a few blocks away from the one she had been going to for years, it wasn’t as resplendent, though it did the job of making her feel cocooned from the world just right.

   Six months had elapsed since the encounter with the stranger, during the second of those months the girl’s life had veered into utter chaos. One morning as Ewelina walked into her office at work and set her lunch box on the table, she got a call from her boss, Mr. Ericson, who informed her he would like to meet with her in his office.

         “It just doesn’t seem like you’re really passionate about marketing” said Mr. Ericson with compassion, “most of the projects you’ve the submitted in the past year alone have been very low effort. Perhaps you should consider whether this is even the right field for you Ewelina.”

   All the girl could manage to respond was “I understand” with bitter passivity.

    The stalky man’s words echoed in Ewelina’s mind for days on end as she browsed through online postings for jobs in marketing. What else was she supposed to do? She never believed in back up plans, she was all in all the time, and now, she was job-less in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Still, Ewelina clutched on to hope as if it were a life jacket. Remembering that in her wake, her mother always did tell her “No matter where the seas take you, no matter what suns shine down upon you – you will be alright my dear.”

   Two months of relentless job searching went by, and ultimately, Ewelina’s efforts proved fruitless, such that she unable to pay her share of the rent. Dani was more than understanding the first time it happened, offering to cover the girl’s share with her savings. The second month it happened, Ewelina could feel the sharp rap of her friend’s patience chip away slowly.

         “How hard is it for you to get a job? There must be something out there for you to do” she scolded indignantly, not knowing that the poor girl had gone to over thirty different interviews since Mr. Ericson let her go. The atmospheric pressure inside their cramped apartment got so that Ewelina spent most of her days at the library because she felt she was becoming a nuisance to Dani.

   In her heart, the girl never really conceived that Dani would throw her out, not after their deep-rooted past. The third month’s rent did the job. One night, when Ewelina got home from the library, Dani reached her breaking point and threatened to replace her with a coworker who was desperately looking for a roommate. For the first time in months, the girl let herself feel the truth: her life was falling apart. How would she mend a life that was shattered by the loss of a job and a friend?

      It was three days before her mother’s death anniversary when Ewelina stood at the West Fourth Street train station waiting for the F line. She was on her way to another job interview downtown, the last one on her list, when she received a text message notification. It was from the interviewer: “Dear interviewee, we regret to inform you that your appointment with Dizco Media Inc has been cancelled. After careful consideration and review, we have selected another candidate for the position. We encourage you to appl—.”

   Ewelina locked her phone as tears bordered the edge of her eyelids. She thought about why life was so cruel to some people and not to others. First, she was motherless, then fatherless, jobless, friendless, homeless, she simply couldn’t take any more loss.

         “Now what?” she murmured out loud hopelessly. “Now what?!”

   The response was nothing. Ewelina felt that she had absolutely nothing to live for, no one to love; her mother, the only person who had ever made her feel certain she knew love, was dead and she knew that everything that had happened in her life up to this point was pointless. All the mornings after her father had kicked her out that she waited outside of soup kitchens, the nights full of terror over not knowing where she would camp out next, the schooling, the rebuilding. Only to see it all collapse.

     The blaring horn in the distance interrupted her thought. She saw the way train lights peeked through the dark tunnel like glowing eyes watching, waiting, tempting her toward them. Ewelina moved closer to the yellow line; if her life would fall apart, she decided she wanted to have a say so in it.

         “Now what?” she repeated under her breath. “Now what?” The screeching of steel against steel closed in on her as she prepared to jump. “Now what?”

But unexpectedly, she felt a pinch on her arm and glanced sideways to see a delicate brown hand yank her toward the middle of the platform.

         “You are never alone, and you are loved more than you can imagine”, the girl, instantly overtaken by an ineffable warmth turned her head.

         “Whisper. What are you doing here?”

         “I told you we’d lend each other a hand. Go, live my child, you have so much to live for. Never forget that your mother, loves you.”

         “I know” whispered the girl with a smile.

         “I must go now my dear, but I promise you, you’ll live.”

   Ewelina watched Whisper disappear into the crowd of commuters exiting the train.

         “Wait Whisper, who are you?” she shouted at the crowd.

   On that same week, the girl decided to go back to the library in search of Whisper, something in her knew it wasn’t a coincidence that the stranger found her right before she intended to end it all.

         “Fridays and Saturdays” the girl rehearsed as she entered the room doors, “she must be here today”.

     She walked down the aisle of tables looking for the one where she and Whisper had first acquainted, hoping, praying, the woman would be there. Her shoulders sagged upon seeing that the table was empty. Approaching it, she glanced at an open book laying on the table and recognized it as the red leathered Bible Whisper had once set down on the same table. The slightly weathered pages were opened to a section near the book’s end, among the black ink words, highlighted in yellow, was the verse: “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels[1].”

         “Whisper must be nearby” the girl deduced. So, she waited for hours, anticipating that the owner of the book would eventually come and claim it. She waited so long that the bright moon could be seen through the windows of the library.

         “Attention visitors, the library will be closing in twelve minutes.” a sweet-sounding voice spoke through the intercom. Ewelina got up from her seat and placed Whisper’s Bible inside her bag with defeat. And when she walked through the room doors and out into the hallways leading down to the exit, her eyes stopped on a sign that read: “PUBLIC LIBRARY HIRING! No previous experience required; love of libraries preferred. APPLY HERE.”

[1] Hebrews 13:2