The Latina Librarian | La Bibliotecaria
"A quiet librarian's life changes when a regular patron starts leaving love poems in the books she recommends"
The Latina Librarian
La Bibliotecaria
The first poem appeared in a García Márquez novel.
Your eyes hold more stories than this library. I'd spend lifetimes reading them.
I assumed it was a mistake. Someone's forgotten bookmark.
Then I found another.
You recommended Neruda. Now I dream in verse. All of it about you.
This one was in the book I'd shelved yesterday. Whoever was leaving them knew my patterns.
"Beautiful and mysterious," my coworker Teresa said when I showed her. "You have an admirer."
"I have a stalker."
"Same thing. Find them."
I started paying attention. Who checked out the books I recommended? Who lingered in my section? Who watched me from behind the stacks?
Then I noticed her.
The woman with curly hair who always sat by the window. Who read poetry. Who looked up every time I walked by.
"You," I said, approaching her table. "Are you leaving the poems?"
She blushed crimson. "You weren't supposed to figure it out."
"I'm a librarian. Research is my job."
Her name was Renata, and she'd been coming to my library for a year. She was a professor of literature at the university, too shy to speak but not too shy to write.
"Why poems?" I asked.
"Because you deserve beautiful words. And I didn't trust my spoken ones."
"They're working," I admitted. "I've been thinking about you."
"Good thoughts?"
"The best kind."
We met in the poetry section—our unofficial space. She'd read me verses; I'd recommend new discoveries.
"This one is perfect for you," I said, handing her a volume of Alfonsina Storni.
"Why?"
"Because she wrote about love that couldn't be contained. And that's how you make me feel."
"I make you feel uncontainable?"
"You make me feel everything."
Our first kiss was between the stacks, surrounded by books that had witnessed countless stories but never one quite like ours.
"We could get in trouble," I whispered.
"Some things are worth trouble."
"You're a professor. You should know better."
"I know many things." She kissed me again. "Including how to not get caught."
We didn't get caught. We were careful—professional at work, ourselves everywhere else.
"Move in with me," she said after six months. "I have too many books for one person."
"I have a library's worth of recommendations."
"Then you'll fit right in."
Our home became a library itself. Books on every surface, poems pinned to walls, stories surrounding us like armor.
"I still leave you poems," she said. "Did you notice?"
"In the coffee grounds. In my lunch. In my coat pockets."
"Is that annoying?"
"It's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for me."
She proposed with a handwritten poem, tucked into a first edition Borges she'd bought at auction.
"Marry me," the last line read. "And let me write you forever."
"Yes," I wrote back, slipping my answer into her briefcase. "Forever isn't long enough."
The Latina librarian—where love is found between the lines, and the best stories are the ones we live.