Where’s Angel, in a Bookstore

There are bookstores that feel like places you visit, and bookstores that feel like places that have been waiting for you.

In Williamsburg, under those round, hanging lights, the shelves rise up like small city blocks—memoir beside travel writing, new nonfiction leaning into poetry—each spine quietly doing its work. The room is bright in that gentle way that makes you slow down without noticing you’ve slowed.

Where’s Angel, in a Bookstore is a simple question, but it carries a whole evening inside it. Angel could be anywhere in here: tucked into an aisle, tracing titles with a fingertip, pausing at a table of staff picks, reading a first page as if it’s a doorway.

I like imagining that—someone you care about disappearing into a place like this, not lost, just absorbed. There’s a comfort to it. Among the ordinary movements—coats shrugged off, phones checked, books stacked and restacked—there’s that faint, growing feeling that the mundane is quietly mysterious.

Maybe that’s all the “where” you need. Not a pinpoint on a map, but a room full of sentences, light pooling overhead, and the sense that if you wait long enough, you’ll look up and find each other at the same shelf.