Writing

I just woke from this wonderful dream where I finally gave up writing. It happened like this:

I had this big suitcase full of all my writing: all my scribblings, all my poems and luggage. It was bulky and awkward to carry, so I left it outside and went to dine in an Indian restaurant alone. It would be safe, I thought, by the curb.

The meal was fine and exotic. The busboy was Mexican—and I made a mental note to write that down. But when I came outside, all my notebooks and pens, all my stories, all my luggage was gone.

A homeless man motioned toward the street. “It was just...," he began—and then I saw the culprit. A younger, more-attractive man sprinting through the park, handling the bag as if it were weightless.

There was some good stuff in that bag too, including all fifty two of my favorite story's revisions, an idea for a new character—a perfect one, to be placed in some story or other—and the fourth start of my first novel. All gone.

So I went back to school. I took a cab and when we pulled up out front I realized I didn't have money to pay the fare. The driver turned around and said it was OK. After all, my bag had just been stolen. And in a motherly way, she opened the door such that it seemed to open on its own.

I thanked her and walked up under the stony arches of University, cutting through the bright-eyed, babbling freshman in the dark museum halls where colorful banners for bands and sea turtles and marine biology programs hung from the rafters. I wondered why I hadn't studied marine biology, or turtles, or bands. Everyone seemed so happy.

Then as if by miracle, there she was—walking right beside me. We were in the bookstore where we'd first met. I glanced to my side and thought to ask if she hated me yet, but she was smiling, exploring—babbling about literary theory and psychology—adding more and more books to a wheelbarrow-borne stack that nearly touched the ceiling. 

I couldn't afford to buy them, and of course neither could she. But she didn’t seem to mind. I just gazed at the books as she floated there, speaking in quiet little cycles that reminded me of silence produced by a stream. Then she turned to me, cheerily, and exclaimed, “Me and you in the bookstore!”

I tried to return her toothy grin, but as I scanned the books she’d chosen I was stunned to find that I’d read every single one. I wanted to know if she remembered that it was I who first introduced her to John Irving, and if she knew that all his books were the same. I wanted to know why she’d never read Tolstoy, Melville or Dostoyevsky—and if she intended to read War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The Brothers Karamazov, or just buy them.

And I wanted to point out that she should have said “’You and I in the bookstore’ not ‘Me and you,'" and moreover admonish her for lying—(I couldn't be ‘in the bookstore’, as she’d claimed, because I was obviously in my bed, dreaming). But then I stopped. 

Because I was in my bed dreaming. And really I'm most intrigued by the things I can't control.