This past weekend I spent a little time in an antique store. The knick knacks and torn quilts looked sleepy and forgotten, but not lost. Fabric from a hundred years ago or more hung draped in streams of sunlight that swam with dust. The patterns so faded that the sun had no effect on them whatsoever.

That’s how I spent a good portion of my weekend. Tucked away, working on a sneeze in the back of a shop. I didn’t buy anything. And I didn’t trade any valuable part of me for any items. No one asked what I was doing there.

When I left, I breathed the saturated air that you can find at the shore. And I realized that, in the shop, the world had been dampened; a dampening broken now by the crashing waves and the cruising cars, broken by child’s laughter and traveler’s conversation, or a dog bark.

I realized the store had been cold when I felt the sun on my face, and dark when I lowered the sunglasses from the top of my head to wear them.

I don’t know if the feeling of being cold and hushed was sitting on a shelf in the store. Maybe it sat beside the doll whose eye had been missing for so long that the discolored fabric where it had been stitched no longer stood out against the rest of the face. I may have picked up the feeling when I shifted a stack of chipped dishes, or lifted that book that required two hands when handling to keep its spine and pages together. And if I did take the cold and the silence with me, carried it past the woman who was half asleep at the register, no one called me a thief.