Chapter Text
It was no coincidence that the moment Amalia Balash struck the ‘s’ key on the keyboard in her phone’s browser it prompted her to choose one of her most frequently visited websites, a blog on Tumblr called ‘Shelf Life’. After all, she had only visited the page far more than she was willing to admit to in the past few months when it had first popped up as a recommended blog.
It was unsurprising that Tumblr had prompted her to follow the blog in the first place; her blog, after all, was an odd sort of mishmash of her personal criticisms and compliments of the books she was reading (she had just begun ‘Les Misérables’ at one of her friend’s request and was finding that, although seemingly long it was a compelling read), of silly and funny posts that crossed her dash and of snippets of things she had written herself. The last of those items mentioned were that ones that she felt the most odd yet proud about; it was as if on one hand, she needed someone’s approval for her pieces and on the other, she needed to keep them secret.
Amalia began navigating away from Shelf Life’s post about Anna Karenina and how he, for he mentioned in his description of himself that he was a man currently living in Budapest, could see Anna on every train platform. He also mentioned that, no matter how hard he tried to catch up to her, no matter how hard he ran or how loud he shouted, he could never save the mysterious stranger from the fate that he knew awaited her. She navigated back to her dashboard when a notification had caught her eye.
And so, it was on that lovely November day where a chill had just started to cool the air enough to pinch the skin of anyone who had been caught outside without a sweater, that Amalia saw something that she had never thought she would see:
ShelfLife is now following you. Yay!
Amalia stared at the blue screen with the impertinently upbeat bright white message with a small picture of a drawing of a bookshelf for another long moment. Could this really and truly have just happened?
Yes, she'd sent him some of those silly questions from ask memes; she's seen them there and found it impolite not to ask at least one question about the person whom she'd been following for months. He'd always respond with something clever and witty. Every once in a while she would ask his opinions on some of the books she had read that she was not sure if he had. Again, he'd respond kindly, usually saying he'd read the book and every once in a while he would ask for her opinion, which she was only too happy to supply.
After a couple of times that this had happened, he'd messaged her, and the two would transfer the conversations that they would normally have by his ask box to messages. Once again, at most Amalia could consider them acquaintances.
A tiny blip echoed from the young woman’s laptop to around her living room and startle her back to the present moment. It appeared that ShelfLife had messaged her again.
So it appears that I had forgotten to follow you. Oops. I would like to say that I liked your last post about ’Les Mis’.
It's quite alright! Amalia responded. And yes, I do love how all things Hugo wrote about can still be applied today. It just shows that everything has a meaning.
Speaking of meanings, what does ’Dearfriend’ mean?
Amalia sighed after read the message. Her username was the only one that she had been able to find that had not already been in use by another Tumblr user after the better part of forty-five minutes spent going through things like WarandPeace and other book references. She had tried to be creative, but in the end it appeared that too many other people had registered with cool names before her. So, in the end, she just settled on something she had always wanted to start a love letter with, but had not yet had any opportunity to do so.
Only a dear friend can know, she typed back quickly.
Yes, she decided. A cheeky response was better than I simply had no other ideas at the time and am now far too lazy to change it.
She glanced at the dark-rimmed analog clock that hung on her cream-coloured wall; to Amalia's utter dismay it informed her in a not too gentle manner that it was half past the hour and that she'd need to leave soon so as not to miss her bus, and by default the opportunity to pass out her résumé at businesses located near her university.
When looking for a part-time job, the neighbourhood seemed to hold a lot of promise. There were quite a few mom and pop owned stores that ranged from parfumeries to hardware stores. There was also a bar where she could apply, and a department store. Though it pained her to have to do so just after he had struck up another conversation, Amalia bid a quick and polite adieu to ShelfLife, grabbed her favourite little white purse that could hold much more that it should (after all it could hold her lipstick, her bus card, her gloves, her keys, her phone, her wallet, and so, so much more!) and a semi-professional looking black jacket to match her slacks and proceeded on her way out.
As she walked through the crisp autumn leaves that still littered the ground like a red, yellow and brown rug, Amalia tried to remember the name of the adorable-looking parfumerie she had seen not four blocks from her campus. The one with the slightly older man and the youngish delivery out front some mornings. Mészarós? No that did not sound right. Mar… Mar-something. She decided that no matter it's name it was where she wanted to drop off her résumé and her letter of recommendation from her former employer. It just seemed to have an inviting atmosphere.