The Water Aisle and the Woods
Water aisles, forests, bookstores—three distinct locations that encourage Will Eichler to wonder and question.

Water aisles, forests, bookstores—three distinct locations that encourage Will Eichler to wonder and question.
It never really occurred to me that all grocery stores are set up in the exact same way. I mean, of course they are. Why wouldn’t they be? But I never thought about the fact that every Walmart, every Safeway, every Giant has an identical floor plan to every other store that bears the same name. I can walk in the door, turn, and find the exact aisle in the exact same place, with the exact same product, over and over and over again. And this summer, I have done just that: work requires me to. And now I know that most Safeways keep the bottled water in the same place, even if the aisle number is different. My work week for the last couple of months has been this sort of self-imposed water aisle exile wrapped up in a cycle of endless déjà vu. The steady rhythm of turning off my car, walking into the store, and turning right and heading toward Aisle 9, 12, or 26 (depending on the location) goes beyond the sort of typical day job repetition. As I travel across Southern Maryland in a spiderweb pattern weaved by my Mazda 3, I have more time to myself than I really ever do outside of work. Which of course means more time to think.
I have begun to wonder if I will walk into the stockroom of one store and appear in another. If the blending together of stores is the first step to unlocking some sort of breach in reality. Maybe I can step from store to store until I achieve some sort of retail dimensional connection. After I wonder all this, I think that this remarkably silly idea would be a good idea for a short story, and I jot it down in my notes app for later, to either be expanded or forgotten, like a random item on a shelf: identical bottles of water all placed next to each other in a straight line, labels facing outward.
When I am not wondering about the retail nexus, I think about the woods. I don’t get outside much nowadays. I spend most of my days in the car or in a store, and when I get home I collapse onto my couch where the dog slaps me with her paw until I pet her, and I keep thinking about the woods: about how forests all look so similar to one another; how each tree, bush, and stone all look about the same, at least to me. I have not had the chance to visit many, or at the very least I have been in fewer forests than I have grocery stores. The nuances and variations in the layout of a grocery store are ingrained in my mind in a way that the different ways a forest lays about upon the earth isn’t, but sometimes I think there is something close between the two. The way each store still manages to establish a small sense of identity by changing some aspect of the layout, the way they claim that they are not just any Safeway, or any Giant, but this specific one, where the water aisle is next to the chips, or where this one product is kept with the sports drinks instead of the bottled water, reminds me of the woods. Each forest looks so similar at a distance, but once you go in, wander through aisles of trees and beaten paths, you see the way the forest you’re in is different from the previous one, and the one before that, and the one you go to next.
“I can spend as much time wandering through a bookstore as I can a forest, and certainly longer than I do scanning the water aisle.”
When I was, I think, around ten, and on vacation with my family, I went on a hike with my older brother. We pushed ahead of the rest of the family and bounded down the trail that we thought looped back around to the top of the mountain we were on. It did not (it went straight down, how we did not put together that it wouldn’t loop back is something I think about to this day), and so we pushed farther and farther down the mountain until we were sweat-soaked and panting, sitting on a rock, and surrounded by trees and foliage that all looked exactly the same as the other trees we had passed in our misspent time stumbling along the trail. That was where we were when our parents and younger brother came looking for us not long after. Outside of the obvious directional clue that my brother and I had, we had no way of knowing that we were not looping back on our old path. We had left no marks on the trail to refresh our memory — not even footsteps in the dirt to show we had been there. Perhaps if we had, we would have realized we never saw those marks again, and thus realized that we were not, in fact, on the looping path.
The thing about that forest though, even if at the time I thought it looked like every other forest, is that it wasn’t just like any other forest. The trees had grown in a specific way so that they could flourish on the mountainside. The roots split and branched and burrowed through the dirt and along the rocks until they found the perfect place inside the earth to soak up the water. It was a completely unique network of endless, interweaving aisles.
People have done so much to push nature back and make marks on the world, but we can’t help but keep the little idiosyncrasies that we found when we arrived. We always have to make sure there’s some little mark that says not only that we were here, but that we did something slightly different. Just like the trees have to grow in different ways in each different place. Part of me supposes that all of this is obvious. Of course all forests are unique, of course all grocery stores are, at the very least, similar, and of course both humanity and the universe all leave marks to show their presence. But it is comforting to think about, and I have so much time to think these days.
After this second batch of ramblings, after thinking of both the retail nexus and the woods, I think about books. I can spend as much time wandering through a bookstore as I can a forest, and certainly longer than I do scanning the water aisle. But I suppose a bookstore would still count as a part of the retail nexus if I were to ever get access to the backroom. The rows of shelves are just like the regimented aisles, and each thing has its place: the fiction shelf, the memoir shelf, the cooking shelf. Each one is full of identical books with their title-sporting spines facing outward. Whenever I find myself in a bookstore, I think about which shelf I might find my own writing on. Will my (hopefully) published work end up in the poetry section? Fantasy? Memoir? Will I write and write and write until I get a shelf to myself like Stephen King or Sarah J. Maas? Will any of it stand out at all compared to the hundreds of other books scattered across dozens of shelves? Does my writing have enough of its own little idiosyncrasies to make someone else love it? Find comfort in it? Or is it another identical water bottle lined up on the shelf, surrounded by little bits of uniqueness but not quite one of them itself?