I hate shelving nonfiction. I love working to libraries, but wherever I go, it’s the same.

I could spend hours labeling fiction, adoring sliding novels into their rightful places and delicately tugging spines to the front of the shelves.

Some days I even ignore the dreaded bottom shelf of the cart, simply wheeling it back behind the desk as the job of someone else.

When I am forced to face those horrible volumes, a sudden itch comes over me. I want to be doing something, anything else, unable to focus on the neatly labeled numbers, hands pulling at my shirt, my hair. Tiredness spreading through every limb.

I loathe those books.

I want to be far away from them. I want it to be someone else’s job.

I want to roll on the floor and swing my legs off the side of a building and crumple a piece of paper into a very, very small ball.

I don’t want to look at the crusts of knowledge I don’t have the patience to learn. 

I want to return to fiction and fantasy and romance and horror, listening to problems that are not and never will be my own.

I want to escape and run and run until I don’t have to stop running.

I don’t want to sit still and wait and learn and study the numbered spines and the way they stick out unevenly and have dust between the pages.

I hate shelving nonfiction.