An Engraved Invitation

I woke up in the middle of the night--3:24AM to be exact--only to find a stack of half read William Faulkner novels and the Pat Hobby collection from F. Scott Fitzgerald. And then it hit me.

My love life was a disaster. Not that this should've come as a surprise. When you roll over to a bunch of overdue library books instead of a warm body, perhaps the allure of being a bibliophile should be reexamined. After considering the depressing notion that my bedside companions were the immortalization of literary heroes and heroines, I became compulsive about how they would see me.

I had no interest in becoming a 21st century Emily Dickinson, a woman compelled to both the solitude and romanticism of a Repunzeled life. But at the same time, I found it very hard to carry on with anyone around me. I became obsessed with classifying them as either a protagonist or an antagonist and when I couldn't decide which category they fell into, I wrote them off. Literally. I took them out of my address book and stopped calling. And much to my apathy, they eventually stopped calling me. Just as well, I suppose.

Tonight was different, however. It was almost 4am and I could feel the warm breath of a sleeping man on the back of my neck. I turned around--and there he was.

Roark.

I couldn't wait till sunrise--to wake him up--to tell him my thoughts on phenomenology, why the skyscraper was my soul mate, and how I was certain that I could've stood back on the quarry for the remainder of my life.

And in the mess of my satin sheets with an inconclusiveness about my motives, with the moonlight dissipating and making way for new mistakes to be made, I could smell the yellowing of those pages and his skin, and I thought to myself, "Being a bookworm ain't so bad."