People who don’t work in libraries picture the job as reading at a desk between patrons, which is a nice idea and almost entirely wrong. The actual physical constant of my job is the cart. Returns come in all day, get checked in, and go onto a cart to be reshelved, and the cart is never empty, not once, not for nine years, because the moment you clear it, someone returns four more books at the front desk and the cart starts filling again before you’ve even put the shelving list away.

I used to find this demoralizing in a low-grade way I couldn’t quite name, the Sisyphean quality of a task that resets itself constantly, no visible finish line, no cart-empty moment to feel good about. What changed my relationship to it, oddly, was reading about the Stalin-era interviews in Secondhand Time, one of the stories in there is a woman describing a job that was similarly cyclical and endless, and something about how she’d made peace with the repetition stuck with me in a way I didn’t expect from a book about something so much larger and darker than shelving carts.

Now I think about it differently. The cart isn’t a task with a broken finish line, it’s closer to a river, it’s supposed to keep moving, and a library where the cart actually emptied and stayed empty would be a library nobody was using, which is a much worse problem than an eternally full cart. I’ve started finding a strange, unglamorous satisfaction in the physical rhythm of it, the specific muscle memory of knowing exactly where a call number lives without checking, the small private competency of being faster at it now than I was five years ago even though the job itself never announces that improvement to anyone.

My coworkers and I have an ongoing, deeply unserious argument about which section reshelves the worst, mine is nonfiction, everyone else’s is picture books, and neither of us is going to concede the point because we’re both right in different ways. There’s always another cart. I’ve stopped waiting for that to stop being true and started just getting faster at it instead.