BOOKS FOR THE HEART

BOOKS, BOOKS EVERYWHERE!
(above: an artist's rendering of Sabila moving her books; aren't I stylin'??? However, I don't seem to be activating any of my muscles at all! Hell, I'm on the verge of collapsing! I know how to activate my muscles, dammit! Who in the hell commissioned this joker?! I demand my money back! Grrrrrr.)

I've loved books for as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, I'd save up my allowance for weekly visits to the bookstore, from where I'd emerge with DOZENS of books. Two things go without saying: 1) I LOVE MY JOB...working for a publishing company is like being a midWestern, Bush-loving Christian conservative in the plastic lawn decorations section of the hardware store during a going out of business sale (is that EVEN where they buy that horrendous stuff?) and 2) I have more books than normal people.

Anyway, I was pretty bummed this past Sunday and anyone who knows me knows that I deal with anger, frustration, sadness, depression, basically any negative feelings I might have by doing busy house work. I clean up, rearrange things, mop up the kitchen floor, alphabetize the food in the kitchen cabinets, wash the fridge racks (all on the same day). So Sunday's depression energy ended up directed towards my books. I own over a thousand books, you guys. My room is bursting at the seams with them. They're everywhere: in my shelves, in boxes under my bed, in boxes in my closet, in my closet shelves. My room is my books. They are one in the same.

For the longest time, I've wanted to incorporate the books throughout our apartment, placing them in unexpected places. I fantasize about a visitor sitting down on our sofa and his eyes falling on the mini towers of books on our center table or on the side table, at the foot of the antique bureau by the front door, or haphazardly strewn on top of the speakers of our sound system and under the potted plants. And the visitor's heart will sing because there's nothing better in the world than to be surrounded by so much literature! What a treat! What a dream! He can flip through Jack Kerouac's On the Road or Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello or Wynonna Judd's Coming Home to Myself as he waits for dinner to be served or for my father to get off the phone. He can look at the jacket art of On Beauty and feel the smooth edges of Terrell's The King of King's County. Oh, and he can read Borges' Collected Poems and leave our home so much more cultured and inspired than when he arrived. This has always been my dream and on Sunday, I took all of my sadness and I arranged books in random piles and stuck them everywhere. Corners and table tops, under furniture and on top of furniture--they are EVERYWHERE. This is the home of a family that loves books, the new arrangement says. These are people who want to be constantly surrounded by their books.

Somehow, nothing else seems to matter when I've fallen through the open pages of books and have lost myself in words, so many glorious words! And on Sunday, I adorned the apartment with books until, exhausted, I fell asleep on my bed surrounded by the countless books (thousands, I tell you!) that still remain in my room. And while the task didn't heal me completely, it did make me forget for a while and that's all that matters.