Librarian

I want to be a librarian. Not as a lifestyle, of course. Not as forever holding great pieces of literature, fondling them, caressing their spines day to day yet never contributing. I dream of writing things someday that future librarians will sigh over and touch lovingly and eagerly push into the arms of naïve and wide eyed children, cooing “Dear, you’re going to loooove this one, I just know it.”

Not as a lifestyle. Maybe just for a day, though. Just enough to be able to completely surround myself with words, murmurs of history, chasms of wisdom, whispering winds whipping through pages with fierce force, fueled by the emotions of passionate lovers and weeping widows hidden deep within their respective books.

 Ancient authors, spirits risen gratefully from the dead, sighing their words, tugging your earlobe to catch your attention. To see, to feel, to hear: Tolstoy and Austen cavorting around bookshelves, Dante and Shakespeare sliding down the banisters like giggling schoolboys, Dahl and Lewis and Plato in a heated debate. To surround myself with their perspectives and experiences, desires, wishes, wants. Read beneath the lines and on top them and through them, setting up an archeological dig site on their hearts, uncovering with messy, dirty digging and precise procedures their fears and loves and dreams.

Maybe just for a day. Enough time to see what books others check out. To be surprised, watching the mountain of a man with a gruff voice and even gruffer beard request a book on raising toddlers. To see an old woman, eyes like buttery cinnamon rolls, smells like your grandma’s cookie jar, reading about war tactics. To be heart-warmed as a looks-around-8-but-with-that-hair-covering-his-eyes-who-can-tell? boy requests his first library card. To watch a mother, arms wrapped like love around her daughter, reading to her, “If you give a mouse a cookie, he will want some milk.” To feel a mix of emotions as a mix of humanity comes trickling through the hallowed doors of literature, reminding you that though things come and go, authors die and are replaced with eager young things sharpening their pens, words and ideas outlive everyone, lasting lifetimes, lasting eternities. 

Two

I crave you. Please understand, it’s in the most innocent of ways. I crave to hear your thought when your eyebrows rise and begin the cranking of wheels in your brain. I crave to see your face light up, casting out joy like an old projector that you shine on the wall as it whirrs and clickety clicks. I crave to touch, to intertwine fingers with yours, lace them tighter than roller skates, and hold on tight don’t you let go -- not for a long time. I crave to say goodbye and goodnight, to lie next to you, on top, beside, under, parallel, diagonal, caddy-corner. Doesn’t matter.

I just crave to be. To be with you.

It’s lovely long nights of lingering, mornings of mellow meandering. It’s so simple really.

But it’s not because it’s tough. Because love is not love like in the movies. Because movies are magical and they fall in love and kiss and the director says “cut” and they end and go home and forget that just three hours ago they were playing characters who were in love.

Well the movie keeps on in life and you find that love is more than you ever thought. It’s better and harder and shinier and funnier and softer and more dangerous.

But you’re worth it because I crave you.

You take me. I take you.

It’s two mugs of tea on the counter. Two arms wrapped around my waist, two hands folded contentedly. Two imperfect people. Two people who are ok being imperfect together.