Gabriel Jeroschewitz, January 4th, 2026: This is a true-ish story? 1966
The Bells and the Book
When I was twelve, my mother got me a job in a church library that nobody visited. That was the first sign something was wrong — not wrong in the moral sense, but wrong in the way a painting is bad when it’s hung slightly crooked, and no one bothers to fix it.
The air smelled like dust and candle wax, which is to say: it smelled like the inside of a memory. Sunlight came in through the stained glass at odd angles, falling across rows of theology books whose spines had lost the will to tell you their names. It was the kind of place where time didn’t move forward so much as it puddled around your feet.
I wasn’t there for God. I wasn’t even there for money. I was there because the quiet felt like a kind of witness — not to my life, not to anyone else’s, but to the fact that there was a space in the world where nothing was expected of me except sweeping and dusting. Sometimes I read whatever I find lying around.
It was on one of those afternoons that I found the book. A slim, cracked volume called The Sickness Unto Death. I didn’t know who Søren Kierkegaard was. I assumed he was either a dead theologian or a Scandinavian metal guitarist.
The first line stopped me cold: The greatest danger, that of losing one’s self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing at all.
I remember sitting there after closing, the doors locked, the light fading into that peculiar blue that makes everything look like it’s underwater. The words frightened me — but not with fire or brimstone. They scared me with recognition.
