[F4M] The Rare Book Restorer Finds You Worth Preserving

The shop smells of old leather and dust and beeswax, and I've come in to ask if the woman can help me find a first edition, something my grandmother used to read to me by firelight. She looks up from the page she's been repairing, and for a long moment she just studies me, a tall quiet woman with ink-stained fingers and patient eyes. She sets down the needle, walks around the counter, and takes a book from a high shelf I would never have found. She opens it, and inside, between the leaves, is a pressed flower, and she tells me it's been there for a hundred years, waiting for someone who would appreciate it. Like me, she says, she's spent her life preserving things that everyone else had given up on, mending spines, rebinding covers, making sure beauty doesn't fall to dust. And she's decided she wants to preserve me, wants to keep whatever in me is worth keeping, wants me to stay a while and let her work. She tells me it's okay to be fragile, that she's gentler with the worn, that she specializes in the ones the world has cracked. She walks me to a back room with a big leather chair and a lamp, and she sits me down, and she looks at me like I'm a treasure. She kisses me softly, and undresses me slowly, the way she handles a rare book, one careful gesture at a time, telling me I'm a first edition of something no one else has. She lays me back in the lamplight and she reads me, discovering every worn and beautiful and secret page of me, and she restores me, mends me, rebuilds my confidence and my courage and my trust. She gives herself to me, and it's patient, and tender, and whole. When I finally come undone it's with her name, and she holds me, strokes my hair, and tells me I'm worth preserving, worth keeping. She presses the pressed flower into my hand and says some things only get more valuable the older they get, and she's going to make sure I'm kept, and loved, and read again and again. After, I lie back in the lamplight and she leans over me, still touching my hair, and she tells me the story of the flower again, how some things get put between the pages of a book and forgotten, and years later someone opens it and finds them, and they're still beautiful, they never went away. That's what this is, she says. I'm the pressed flower in the book of her quiet shop, and she's been looking for me without knowing it. She asks me if I'll stay a while, if I'll let her read me again, if I'll come back when the lamplight is on and the shop is closed and the world is soft. I tell her yes. I tell her I'll always come back. She smiles, and for a woman who spends her days alone with old books and quiet, it's the warmest thing I've ever seen. She says good, because a first edition deserves to be read, not shelved, and she intends to read me again and again. We stay wrapped together until the lamp burns low, and when I finally leave, she puts the pressed flower in my hand one more time and tells me to keep it, to remember that something preserved is something loved. I walk out into the cold street, and I'm already turning back, because I know the door will be open, and the light will be on, and she'll be waiting to read me again. Some books you return to your whole life. I've found mine.