The city I live in isn’t the most attractive city in the world, but there’s always been something about it that I absolutely adore. I’m not really sure how to explain it. The city is old and new at the same time, bright and dull, small and big. It’s calming somehow, to know that the place I live is just as different and changing as I am. All I do every day is go to school, do homework, sleep as long as I can, and pray to a God who might not exist that I can make it through the next minute, hour, and day. But yet every single day of my life, there’s something about me that changes, at least a little. My teeth get a little whiter, or more yellow. I get into a fight with one of my parents and suddenly I don’t feel like a little kid anymore. I think about my future and suddenly I’m terrified.

There is, though, one place. There’s one place that I am completely and utterly in love with. My town is full of new buildings and apartments being built almost every day, but there’s this one spot that isn’t new. On the corner of 5th Avenue and Main Street, there is an old, run-down, abandoned motel that sits quietly as the rest of the city grows. When I was younger, my friends and I would all walk past the building and shudder at how creepy it was. Then, being kids, we decided it would be a good idea to look inside and check things out.

The police of the city weren’t too keen on trespassing, but the old motel didn’t have locks and no one wanted to pay to put some on. So, we went inside. I remember the first time I walked in there, it was so dusty I sneezed as soon as I went past the threshold. It was quiet and damp and a little creepy. The front desk had old, brown, wet papers scattered around it. There was an old rotary dial phone that sat at the edge of the desk. We looked at room after room, secretly hoping to find something, although thinking about it now, I’m not sure what we were really looking for in the first place.

Finally, at the end of the dark hallway, we all had stopped talking. Standing on the ugly yellow-shag carpet, we stood before a very large door. We all glanced at each other, suddenly a little freaked out to be inside this old motel. I stepped forward, extremely curious. I pushed open the door and there was nothing creepy about the room at all. Actually, it was… beautiful. To me, at least.

Behind that door was a library. A plain, simple, old library. There were cupboards of books, placed erratically around the room. It smelled like dust and the faint scent of damp paper. In the corner of the room sat a blue chair, deep brown oak as its frame. I walked into the room and realized that there was no carpet, only cement with cracks and dirt hidden beneath. There was something about the silence of the room that quietly pleaded to not be broken.

“Wow,” I remember whispering.

“This place smells so bad,” said one of my friends, who had wrinkled her nose.

“Yeah, we should go. It looks like there’s mold everywhere,” another said loudly.

“Shh,” I said, hoping for the serene silence to come back.

My friends started to shuffle outside of the room, all of them muttering about how gross and stupid it was to come inside this building. “It’s so ugly,” one said.

I picked up one of the books on the floor, its pages moist and wrinkled. All I remember thinking was how crazy it was that someone how many years before had held the same book in their hands. I started to flip through it and I suddenly didn’t want to leave. There was something about that place.

Today, though? I stand in front of that old motel, right as bulldozers and the workers pull up, ready to tear down the beauty that once filled so much life. I sit down on the grass across the street from the motel. So maybe that old library didn’t really mean anything to anyone but me. And maybe there really wasn’t something special about that room, about those books, that chair. Those old books held something deep beneath those pages and the dirt in those cracks meant more than an old building pleading to be used. This building, this library, was everyone. How people feel sometimes at the end of the day, cracks beneath the skin and dirt and ugliness and unhappiness— so when does it stop? When does someone see the beauty? Does it ever happen?

The bulldozer turns on and I look up, and I wish I could go back inside one more time, just to smell the old books again.