A garden opened its gates to the homes and houses of booksellers that come and trade dreams, nightmares [not necessarily in that order], thoughts, screams, and wishes [also, not necessarily in that order] to those who go looking for something new, something old, something borrowed. Little museums, endless labyrinths, guiding you through streets made up of trees dressed up as books and vice-versa; leaves pretending to be pages and vice-versa; flowers sprouting words and, you know, vice-versa.

You wander through corridors filled with those spaces, with unknown faces—some of which you used to know—and, suddenly, come across a tome that promises to delve you into the deep black—and—blue and allow you to breathe, little by little, every time you ascend back in to reality. Or is it reality that ascends back to you?

My mind got to know a bookstore, located somewhere in the northern lands of the country, that it had not heard of before. Curious name, it has, for Traga1—and its verbal form Tragar— both in Portuguese and Spanish, can mean a whole lot of things:

As a transitive verb, it can let you know you should and will swallow, are or were swallowing, without chewing properly, that is—and how many times does one find themselves drowning in such an amount of unusual, unusable, unfathomable words whose sole purpose seems to be to penetrate into the nethermost depths of our minds, jaws, and lies, and bring it all to the surface in the way panic attacks, with no warning whatsoever, tend to do?

For, you see, such funny word holds the power to lead anything one wishes to the edge of one’s matter, submerging it into the core of our wondering. How to plunge with no devouring, some might ask—teeth biting onto tongues whilst all we were trying to do was to drag onto our sense of self the courage to, ultimately, make some things disappear—read: those nonsensical logistics some try to make us sip, sup, slurp; better yet, drink, gobble, bolt; actually, absorb, consume, take [which pill?], wishfully dreaming of a realm where our bag of bones, morals, and values would be annihilated.

Figuratively speaking, one does bear violence for sale splashed onto our substance just as one does withstand every spurious propaganda—as if it could ever be qualified as something else—that the overruling forces our eyes to take in—as if we’re ever eager to tolerate so.

Thus, such simple word reminds us to pause, take a breath, inhale some cigarette smoke—in order to make it, at least, cinematic—, so long as we keep drawing our-mind-opened so that our everlasting yearning for expelling whatever capitalistic madness they try and try, and try to gaslight us with no longer chooses to sink.

Perhaps, that’s why this bookstore chose such an allusive name, finding meaning in selling Iberian stories, from Portuguese to Galician tales and songs, to all sorts of curious, historical facts concerning the peninsula, inviting its buyer—future—reader to submerge themselves within pages that recall whatever was left caved in into the lands of unwilling forgetfulness and unattended ignorance, challenging whomever to look back into the past in order to be able to observe the present and think the future.

1Traga Mundos Livraria

Traga[r]

Just like the infinitude of {the} everything