My favorite thing to do when not feeling well is go to the library. It's like shopping without the assistance. I would welcome shop help usually when shopping if the staff in stores were trained and there was a dialogue more than someone wishing they could be helpful and you wishing they could help you.
I miss really wonderful shop help. But to be truthful there is no balm like the public library. I don't have to be accountable for anything so I can try it all. And lately… as nights have been… I have needed to fall into a book night after night. This pregnancy isn't easy, for some reason the slightest stress seems to throw my body into a panic. I'm frustrated with the exhaustion and the exhaustion keeps staring back at me with it's beady, under-the-bed eyes. I swear it stole that expression from the closet monster. But everyone knows… everyone…that closet monsters are terrified of mothers so the exhaustion must be it's blood cousin.
At night the dreams climb to high points and jump off in my head. Last night it was crime scenes, sheets soaked in blood and women staged tied up but not playacting. I live enough on set to know real violence when I see it and this is the result of paging through a real crime novel. Women were hired 1950's and told they were posing for a crime magazine. My swift eye galloped across the page until I knew it was perhaps something I should not have read, not for my mind. And then I tell myself, hold fast. Bear witness. So there it was, the sequence of first shots that were modeling shots and then the horrifying realization that they were actually about to be harmed. And of course, as someone in film, I could spot the immediate difference.
The crime committed were so awful and the evidence (the photographs) lead the lead detective to form the first database to cross reference serial killers. His outrage and frustration still read poignant even when I am seeing the words over fifty years later. Los Angeles. I love you. You are in so many ways, my only home town.
So tonight, I picked books on Africa and biographies. I wanted to read about lions, the Maasai, warriors. I want elsewheres and real voices, not voices of fiction. I want hot places. I miss Melrose and La Brea. I miss a city of optimism, a city of crime, a city of hope.
And between the lines and margins, the lien of thoughts not all-good. I think when you argue, in a couple, apologies must be swift and real. But when they are not he says, "You are so distant, so cold," and I think…no. I'm not cold. I'm in Los Angeles in my mind, in the tangle of the city, I am in the valley on hot afternoon, blocks from sushi and Critter's apartment, I am here, I am nowhere, I am where I belong.
