Totems

There is a regular, daily game I play, lately; I cannot stop. I fall asleep exhausted much earlier than I really want to, unplanned. Face unwashed, half-dressed, a light still on, or candles burning, or the television humming in the background, or a book that ends up crushed beneath me. I sleep in odd and crunched up positions, and my whole body aches and pulls later, during the day, remembering. For several hours it is like this, heavy and deep and blank, and then it starts -- a halfway-awakening, but my head is still mostly somewhere far away, and my eyes don't want to open entirely, and I turn over, squint at the clock, and tell myself that I will get up, scrub my face and brush my teeth, undress, turn off anything that might be still turned on, check that my alarm is set for the morning, go back to bed for real. I tell myself that I will do these things...but first I'll close my eyes for just another minute. And then, perhaps 30 minutes later, perhaps an hour, I do it all again. And again, and again, until it is suddenly morning, and I never slept with any true intention, so my mind can trick my body into thinking that none of the sleep truly counted as anything at all. It's a vicious little pattern, and on the weekends I try to break free of it, which sometimes works, but this time it doesn't and I don't. On a Saturday night, when the day turned long and filled with too many things, what I mean to do is wash my hair -- because three days between washings is no problem, but edge into the fourth, and it's disastrous. What I do, instead, is fall asleep, and wake up more than once, and don't get up, and suddenly it's after 2:00am. But it isn't like I have to be up early for any reason on a Sunday morning, and there's no one here but me, so why not take a long hot shower in the middle of the night? And it's nice, to sit in bed with wet hair, after, the room so entirely dark and still in that 3:00am particular kind of way, a hush of rain outside beyond the windows.

I meet him for coffee, in the morning -- the last whispers of the morning before it stretches into noon and therefore solidly daytime -- he is going away for another five week trip, and wants to give me the bag of funny animals to keep while he's away. The years we were together, I developed my own personal pantheon of funny animals -- when people know you like something, they tend to offer it to you, rather a lot, the end result being a huge collection of various funny little animals, some wearing clothes, and some without, that makes me seem crazy, if one thought that I had gone out and acquired them all myself. Some came from him, in fact -- and though he never would have admitted it in public, he loved my weird collection at least as much as I did. My very favorite was a gift from him, the second Christmas we were together -- an elephant, who when I got him was wearing purple pajamas and little bunny slippers (and who has since amassed a whole cardboard box full of costumes and outfits and random accessories). He would make Elephant do funny little dance routines for me, along the arms of the couch, and cut out construction paper bandit masks for him to wear on Halloween. Being together for as long as we were, people also gave him funny animals on occasion -- gifts through association, I suspect. A monkey, and a polar bear that had been meant for me but ended up as his (because Monkey needed a friend, and my animals were already such a tightly-knit little clique). And he had, from years ago, a tiny white bunny -- with big staring red eyes, and a total lack of cotton tail. It had been gathering dust in a box on a bookshelf when I moved in, and was uncovered one day, and very quickly Creepy Bunny became our totem animal. When I moved out, and we split up, Creepy Bunny stayed with him (it had been his, after all, to start with). But now, when he goes away on trips for any length of time, he gives me the bag of animals -- Monkey and Polar Bear and Creepy Bunny (and the tiny plastic chimp who is his pal) -- so that they aren't neglected.

The library had one of its twice-yearly book sales this weekend -- every hardcover book a dollar, paperbacks only fifty cents. And the last thing I really need is any more books, and I am running out of space for any more books...so of course, I went way the hell out to the huge warehouse of a building in a far part of town, to buy more books. Limited myself to only what I could fit into my largest tote bag, so I could get them home with me on the bus. If the library charged by the pound instead of by the book, they'd make more money. I got an enormous dictionary, hardbound and delicate-paged, old and emphatically out-of-date. It's soothing, in the middle of the night, when sleep is elusive, or bad dreams chase me, to sit in bed by the light of the muffled bedside lamp and page through the dictionary; I've done this since I was very small (but I haven't had a good dictionary -- and what I really mean by that, I guess, is a large one, an old one, a heavy one -- in what feels like an extremely too-long time). I like how, after hours of sifting through tables and boxes and shelves of old, used books, you emerge feeling dry and grimy and covered in ghosts and echoes. I like the way the smell of paper and dust and words lingers.

And there are a lot of reasons why we were not suited to be together...but then, there are things like this, and it might not make any sense to anybody else, but these are big huge reasons why things worked between us, why they were mostly good, for as long as they were (and even in the end, when I left, it wasn't that anything was bad, it was just that it was not Right, and I no longer had the energy or the desire to pretend otherwise). But we sit and drink coffee and tea, in the corner of a coffeeshop, in chairs that look like they came from some point in the not-so-distant future (but are shockingly comfortable, and I have the fleeting thought that maybe nobody would notice if I quietly scooted this ugly chair out the door with me when I left, so I could sink into it at home, all the time); we talk for solidly two hours, perhaps longer, and it is soothing to be with someone who knows me so extremely well in some ways (though not at all in others) and spill out endless words, and laugh. It is, I guess, like paging through the dictionary in the dark -- I know the words already, and there is no plot with twists to be surprised by, but it's like swallowing warm milk, or floating in it; it soothes and settles, the offhand familiarity. And when we say goodbye and go off in opposite directions down the street, it makes me smile to think that nobody passing by me has any clue that the paper bag I'm carrying contains a small furry polar bear, and a monkey wearing a hat, and a tiny red-eyed creepy bunny.