WHEN YOU NEED ONE
She asked me if she could invite herself for coffee. I told her the machine was broken. She said that that was even better. We rushed up stairs to the bedroom, but got held up on the stairs ripping stuff off and sticking fingers into each other.
Eventually we made it to the bedroom, only to find my king-size bed covered by my degree certificates and half of my library. It was like the Tower of Babel had just toppled. Or that Minerva had rained down books all over the bed. Intellectual manna from Heaven.
Try as we might we could not shift the books and sort out each other. The situation was so delicate. My beautiful books sitting there like a few metric tons of inertia. Too much
desperate desire, up to just a moment ago seemingly hopeless and destined to be unrequited, for any concerted effort at removal.
The books were great classics. Some of which had shaped, perhaps you could say, changed my life. All of them speaking to the dream for a world of equality, free inquiry, poetic joy, to the prospect of sharing the world together, brotherhood and sisterhood and true democracy. But at this moment with the joy of intimate sharing with the sisterhood fast receding, they could all just disappear. Be burnt even.
But there’s never a passing Nazi when you need one.