Lies between lovers.

It's a good thing that I'm the kind of girl who likes to hang out in
the shadows of dusty bookshelves because I think the only way to
distract a breaking heart is to fall back in love. In this case,
characters that exist solely between two bound covers are easier to
contemplate and obsess over than another human would be. Also
convenient is that I happen to have a good deal of time to nurture and
foster obsessions over fictional characters seeing that I've managed
to push any notion of school as far out of my consciousness as
possible, at least for a few treasured months.

I used to like school because I thought we would all sit around in
circles and read beautiful words and talk about character development.
And indeed, school was like that until I thought to myself, what in
the hell am I going to do with an english degree. Teach, my professors
told me. I hate kids I told them all. Then school became very
unappealing because you see, all words were not created equally and
words talking about Marxist theory and integrated marketing strategies
are very ugly. In fact, they are pointless. Any writer wishing to talk
about things like that should not be allowed to write. Tell me about
things that matter; tell me about your life, your secrets, not your
East Asian development theory. Go to East Asia and live in a village
and write me a letter to tell me what it's like. Don't publish a
stuffy book filled with useless make-believe theories. At the very
least, if you want to talk about things like that, put some thought in
it. Writing well goes beyond the mechanics of grammar. Maybe you could
write about two fishermen in a tiny village who live in a hut made of
mud and grass and tell me how development has affected them and tell
me about when they made enough money to buy a 27 inch television which
they power with old car batteries and tell me about when their
neighbors sent their first born son to university in the big city. I
might care about that.

I was just thinking about when I was probably eight or nine years old
my dad would let me watch X-Files before I went to bed and he would
tell me that everything was real and that Moulder and Scully really
did exist. Unfortunately, in my youthful naiveté I believed this all
and was quite convinced that alien beings wished to take me away.
Sometimes, that didn't seem so bad but somehow I developed a terrible
phobia and the only way I could sleep would be to tuck the blankets
under my entire body and over my face, sure that the fabric layer
would prevent abduction. How do you explain that at a sleepover? Um,
sorry I have to zip my New Kids on the Block sleeping bag all the way
up or else a space ship will beam me up.

Maybe I should have given in and untucked the blankets, maybe RIGHT
NOW I could be traveling the universe with mystical beings from a
different galaxy. Maybe I am traveling the universe with mystical
beings from a different galaxy.

Other times when I was younger I convinced myself that the world was
really just some sort of game in which I was the player and everything
and everyone else was there to test and challenge me. In some ways
that might be true, but mostly I was just going through one of those
"the world revolves around me" phases. However, I do remember thinking
that if my life were in fact a game then everyone else around me would
know what I was thinking and what I did, which made me awfully
paranoid. Caution potential parents, things like that happen when you
let your child roam the neighborhood and stay up late and watch
Hitchcock.

An ex-boyfriend called me sometime last week, the one that I thought I
really loved, and of course I didn't answer. I don't like not knowing
what to expect when I pick up the phone and since we hadn't spoken
since last summer I really had no idea what he wanted. He left a long,
rambling message inquiring about my life plans and other very general
topics of conversation. I still haven't returned the call, but I did
think seriously about doing it this evening. I don't have the energy
to pretend to care. I'm not so interested in rehashing flings that
have already happened. So I mention this only because summer time
seems to bring out the ex-boyfriends, as if the weather pattern
changed and they suddenly felt the urge to dig a bit in the past. The
only truly annoying part about ex-boyfriends, mine at least, is that
they feel they have some sort of exclusive right to get in your pants
regardless of your current relationship status, as if just because
they have been there and done that they retain lifetime rights of
access.

I went to the bookstore tonight and I made sure I looked real pretty
because I sometimes get this feeling that I'll find my soul mate in a
bookstore since I am secretly romantic like that. And if you're going
to be my soul mate you better have a fondness for bookstores,
especially the used kind and this time I was sure I'd find a boy
crouched in a little musty corner, intensely examining some novel and
I'd inquire what it was and he would passionately explain it all and
read me some of his favorite parts and then he would scribble
something inside of the cover and hand the book to me and walk away. I
would buy the book and would find that what he had scribbled was his
mailing address and I would write him the best love letter ever
written and he would write back and one day show up at my door with
chocolate covered cherries and we would fall in love and adopt
children from each continent and they would all grow up to be famous
novelists.