Infinitude - A Snippet of the Baltiverse

Reyna Templeton sat in her window seat, sipping from a mug of hot tea. The day was winding down. She was closing in on her 30th birthday, and the world had been turned inside out and upside down. Most of her days were spent camped out at Osprey Books, working on her photojournalism assignments that she still dabbled in. Either that or she dabbled in designing lesson plans for the college course in Photojournalism that she was already close to starting at her alma mater, Towson University. 

She was friends with the two owners of Osprey, Henry Lei and Dean Han. She also knew that they were cousins and that they ran the shop for Dean’s father-in-law. Well, sort of father-in-law. Dean’s wife had passed six months ago, leaving a hole in all of their hearts. 

Just the thought of it caused a tear to leak out of her eye and fall into her teacup. The coronavirus pandemic had taken lots of things from them, but at least it hadn’t taken River Osprey Watson, for whom the bookshop was named. 

But now the quarantine was starting to lift. Well, not lift, so much as ease. Reyna sat back and smiled. It was a time for a new start, she thought. With friends and roommates like Helena Kaye, Georgia Westerfeld, and Willa Forrest, it wouldn’t be hard. Reyna put her teacup down and got up to stretch her long legs, which had started to cramp due to how long she had sat there. 

Everyone in their little group was either seeking infinity or finding solace. There wasn’t much middle ground, Reyna remembered Henry saying one day down at Osprey as he paced through the poetry section, trying to figure out where to place the collection of Pablo Neruda books that had just come in. Somehow, that made her feel better about her birthday coming up. A new decade contained multitudes of little infinities and there was a new world out there to explore.