MOOP!

Author's Note: This post was written a few months ago, before I left Boston for the summer. I am only just now getting around to posting it as I clean up my desktop and put things away on my computer. Enjoy!

There are a multitude of tiny ways that make me think I'm faking it, loving too intensely, caring too much, altogether certain that there is a correct way to live ones life, and I am doing it decidedly Wrong. This is not an uncommon thought, I suspect, though also not a comfortable one. Why can we not accept that maybe this uncertainty is such a crucial part of humanity already?

Of course maybe the secret is not that the uncertainty itself is human, but that aspects of the uncertainty are universal. Little scraps of the world, when two people gasp at the idea that they share their strangeness. A spark of connection, where it is revealed that, reassuringly, we are not alone.

That being said.

"Everything has its place," her father had once said to her when she was young, showing her the long cedar drawers of the card catalogue in the great library where he worked, the brass brackets on its face shining like a policeman's buttons. "But more imoortant, everything's place is labeled. Order is transitive: order one precious thing and order the universe."

"Do I have a place in there?" November had asked, peering over the rim of one of the long boxes.

"Of course, baby," he had said, and with his big brown hand cuffed in plaid and smelling of lemon rinds from her mother's morning tea, riffled through a drawer and pulled a card from the stack.

006.332. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. H. F. Weckweet, 1923. Gleiss & Schafandre: New York.

She had taken it seriously. Even then she had not known another way of doing things. The book was on the seventh floor and she had walked the steps, every one, knowing that this was the only proper way to proceed to her place in the universe -an elevator is cheating. The book was small, in a brown leather cover embossed faintly with a little girl standing naked on a raft, straight as a mast, her stance determined, holding up her dress as a sail. It was, at the time, the oldest thing she had ever seen.

November had read it exactly two hundred and seventeen times, not counting unfinished perusals, since that day. It was, in fact, a long series of novels for children, but November did not care for the others: her father had not pulled them from the great catalogue and called them hers. She had not climbed seven flights of stairs for them. She had spent her birthday this year, her thirty-first, reading it cover to cover, dawn to dawn/ The girl in the book was named September, and she had known that this was meant for her, a message from Hortense Francis Weckweet and her father. Perhaps if the girl had not been called September, November would not have read it two hundred and seventeen times.

Pgs 124-5, Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente

Oh I see. That entry I made a few months ago, babling about the silly little book with the pirates?

I am not alone.

~Sor
MOOP!

ETA: Oh really? Blockquote won't do italics? That's curious. (and damn you society for ruining words I like --I would so rather be able to say "that's rather queer, isn't it?" but noooo.)

ETA2: No wait, I'm just an idiot who can't do HTML.