First MovesLast

After a terrifically bad night, my first day of February began with a hangover and rushing to wake up and just make it out the door. Food seems like such a secondhand notice, but I know, from years of experience trying to sidestep taking care of myself, that it is more important than smoking an entire cigarette before I leave for work. I went to work with my tail tucked between my legs and nearly defensive, but trying not to be. I enter into the routine. I avoid talking to anyone too much, and always prefer to listen. Sometimes this passes as conversation, sometimes it doesn't. I visited briefly with my supervisor, who I wondered frequently throughout the day if she feels a maternal extension here at the library--not in a nurturing, let me feed you and make you feel better way, but in a tough love, this is the way it is and you better be honest and direct way, if she feels she must police and mentor and challenge and provoke--only to realize she's only so human, and so captivating and calm.

A bright point was that I knew I had a book through Interlibrary Loan waiting for me: Running the Books by Avi. It's a story of a man who works--who is--a prison librarian. The introduction is clever, but scarily accurate, about how closely connected are pimps and librarians, in ways of manner, eye for detail, passion for work.

I'm not far into the book. I'm having an evening of feeling torn between reading everything, to which I would ultimately read nothing. But I noticed, while sitting outside in the jungle of balmy, wet, Southern Indiana during a freak winter storm, the call number on the outside of the book. Library of Congress, yes, and all books that are about libraries are last. They're in the Z's. Who knew? It's so appropriate though--unsettlingly appropriate--that librarians should have their books about their libraries at the end of the cataloging system. It's not so much of a "save the best for last" motif, as much as it is one of self-sacrifice.

Oftentimes I've thought about the books I would write, the stories I would memorialize, while shelving other's books and memorializations. I want to write about my experiences in a library. I want to write about librarians--how they're so much just people.

I also want to write about rape, yes of course. And food, though perhaps not combined so as to avoid perversion.

I want to write, in third person, about the woman I am becoming. A woman who broke, like a vase, and is wobbily picking up the pieces and gluing them back together again. The pieces most likely will not be in the shape of a vase again. I don't know yet how I'll look in the end. But they'll be the same pieces as they were in a vase, and they'll fit together in a whole new way. Because they were broken, they won't fit neatly back together. Why be a vase, if I have cracks and scars running all through me? I can't hold water. I can't nourish flowers for even a day. But I can be something else, with the same exact pieces I had when I started, and though the end is not in sight, each pieces fits somewhere and is put to use in a whole new way.

I am very afraid of life. It's not a fear of the future, thankfully, nor even of the past, of which I've really been mostly angry. It's not a fear of being hurt again. This fear is in life itself. I fear what I sense--what I taste, what I smell, what I hear, what I feel. I do not trust enjoyment. And most of all here recently, I am terrified of movement.

These past few nights, I haven't wanted to move. I'd move reluctantly. Still, I would move. I did the dishes from December last night, and was thankful to only have to throw out an obligatory few molded tupperware and wood bowls. I see movement, if only in my mind, and I freeze, and my heart pumps, and there's still movement going on around me and inside me and I'm having such a difficult time accepting it. It's indifferent. It doesn't matter if I accept. It matters if I move with it.