I've pilfered this from the Livejournal, because it struck me as belonging in here as well.
The other night when Cindy crashed here, she asked for a book, preferably something easy to read, to fall asleep to.
We wandered into the bedroom and my eyes fell through the first four nine-foot bookshelves packed with a thousand promises of science fiction dreams that lull me to sleep every night promising to one day divulge their magical solutions to mundane histrionics.
The fifth shelf, my shelf, a hundred of the books that have survived leaving home way too young, countless moves under countless circumstances, countable and yet still numerous cities, countries, postal codes, gifts of my own first dreams and fairy tales to the mewling and yet already book-wormed children of dear friends.
The shelf begins ostentatiously, half of my largest books of poetry, Keats and Dunsany, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Denise Levertov. Moving past hand-painted hardcover fairytales, there are bumps and spaces of my brain-blood (more Science Fiction), dragon tales and fairy stories, the occasional perfectly poetic work of fiction or non-fiction, Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen that swalled my heart and affections and taught me to create home within a building, and David Sedaris' Naked that taught me that perhaps a few of my less exciting inanities were just as significant as that time with that guy in that alleyway with the candlestick.
There are lagoons of my life on that shelf, the first seeds that turned me from human to dreamer, from Normal Girl into a Monstre.
Soaking my feet in a puddle or two my eyes fell on the very definition of bedtime stories.
A tiny, worn, black and green copy of Arabian Nights.
Cindy concurred and was off to bed in the extra room, with a borrowed night-light and a fistful of my first influences.
I grew up in a polish household, the only available books in english were my mother's medical texts (which explains why one particular tow-headed child preferred feces and sedentary to poo and lazy) and what I good pilfer from the elementary school's tiny, one-room, excuse for a library.
The two shelves that weren't filled with prayer books and bibles, that is.
In any case, after the thousand and one tales passed into Cindy's hands, they spent Saturday morning on the coffee table in the living room, then they served faithfully as a hot plate for a pot of Imported (from Paris of all places) Jasmine tea when a friend who I've had lunch with in all the cities (Paris, Amsterdam, Schipol, Frankfurt and now Toronto) but the one we both grew up in (Montreal) appeared for dinner that night, and then they sat there through Saturday night's festivities, alone and wafting fantastic creatures into the sober stones of the fireplace.
They sat there patietly through Sunday's molasses-like minutes, among plates of leftovers and bowls of spicy bean soup, they listened as we sat and let our brains empty of content and fill up with the weak, tenuous, excuses for information and cheaply woven fabric of false tales. Tales without the dreams etched into their seams.
Wandering upstairs last night I wasn't ready for sleep, was still stubbornly refusing the call of my digital extension, when they made their move, echoing through the sharp curve of the white teapot and pointing out
that I'd just finished another book, and that their short, swift exhalations would be perfect to keep me occupied until my mind was satisfied of influx for the day.
Fifty pages later I was still lost in the clever weave. Sheherezade was telling the story of a fisherman who was listening to a story told by an Afreet who was telling the story of Sinband of the Seven Seas who was telling the story of the second time he left home to seek his fortune.
I stopped to scratch my butt-cheek, then, and idly stroke Dave's snoring shoulder, and realized how clever it was to weave stories that way. How innovative, how inspired. How perhaps armfuls (eight hundred or so) of years ago it was appreciated, during the time of such poets as Hariri and Ibn Khaldoun when they built Baghdad on a foundation of excrement, sweat, slavery, and poetry.
For entire moments before I fell asleep, I was the brilliant poet, sitting on the steps of Baghdad, pipe in hand and dreaming technicolour responses to the thick dust in the streets.
For entire moments, it was eight hundred years ago, and the Island-sized fish and the Afreet with his feet in the sand and his head in the clouds were just as fantastic and magically impossible as they were to the large lords of Baghdad, filled with spiced wines and delight, as they were to a little girl lost in a big wrought-iron bed, surrounded by the crackle of electricity in a city filled with too-large cars and a different sort of roaring beast.
For entire moments I understood all of the stories.