Things have changed since I sat in this library almost 6 years ago. The sitting area used to be different, there were fewer chairs in the hall, the lounge which used to be leisurely decorated with colorful furniture only a few years ago, was now filled with glass partitioned cubicles, and the north end, which had empty meeting rooms, now boasted of a new cafe with elegant round staircase on the side. Things change, some because we want them to, and some because we need them to. But the books, well, I can't say for sure, but I feel most of them, looked exactly the same to me.

Today when I walked down to the A level, which was just below the main hall, and where I had spend a lot of my "free" time, it looked just as quaint and just as welcoming, and so I walked to the aisle that had the book I so dearly loved.

On the A level, there is a row of wooden chairs in front of a humongous collection of literature. Old and new, several languages, different eras, classics, contemporaries, books on witchcraft, books on pandemics. Some of them more than 120 years old some published in the last month. I am aware that I am describing any library, but it truly is magnificent. When you walk through the aisles it feels that there is something hidden between them waiting to be found. I can't tell you why, but it felt safe everytime I was in there.

And above all, sometimes, like hidden treasures, I would find the notes people had left in the books. When I picked up an old edition of "The picture of Dorian Gray," that was first borrowed in 1935, I found a small note in one of the pages, written in dusty pencil, "this man needs some help." But some others were more thoughtful, on a story by E.M. Forster, someone had asked in a barely readable cursive "trying to forget? what an exercise in vain." Most of them, though, were just commentary, "this is really good," "this makes no sense," "ask Alex about this paragraph." And, my favorite, on the last page of a poetry collection by Emily Dickenson, an old book that had a warning on it "this book is fragile," written in fading ink, was a sentence that made me come here often, "this book changed my life."

Once I sat on the wooden chairs and wept as I started to read the final chapters of "The end of loneliness." It was a sad book, about suffering and how to learn to live with it. Or so I think, maybe someone who picks it up 50 years form now would find commentary about this book wildly different from mine. And that is what makes it unique. Here, I found the thing I was looking for. An end to loneliness, even for a discomforting winter evening, even for an hour, and I found it, between the stacks filled with paper and leather and fading writings of those who had wept between those pages before I was even born. I hope no one ever feels the need to change a place like this. If not for knowledge, for empathy atleast, what else there is to preserve?

And maybe for the final time, I walked out of the place with a new thought in my head. This time, though, it was a disquieting realization that I may never find a place like this again so open to me. Maybe, at last, I had finally left school.