Library Time

I recently got a new internship at the library! Books! Leisure! Relaxed oafs! Writing time!…Uh, no. The only thing accurate is the Books! part. Librarians work at a very odd pace. It goes by fast enough for only a few handful-of-minutes breaks, but slow enough to look like we’re doing nothing.

I planned for the magical hardly-work-at-all pace. I have a short story that’s due this week, and confidently planned it to coincide with my shifts at the library. I was going to write the details of the last scene’s setting and/or the skeletons of 3 other settings.

I wrote nothing.

O.K., that’s a lie, but it was notes about the job. Doesn’t count for my current story.

What I did do was laminate book covers. You take the lamination paper, put the book two squares from the bottom and two squares from the side, turn the book over, measure it from that side, cut the paper, peel off half, or one book side, of the lamination paper. put the book under the sticky side. Use a blue edge thing, or a ruler, to press the paper over the book… oh, look it up.

That was my morning. After lunch I took the cart down to the main floor, shoveled our books and movies onto the cart, then rolled  it onto the elevator, and got off on our floor.

That was refreshing.

Then the rest of my shift was spent displaying, shelving, and straightening out the books. I got into a manga battles with two boys who didn’t think that organized shelves are nice. They thought that it’s nice if books are on top of each other and cast over the chairs.

Kind of like me at home. Don’t tell my boss that.

I’ll adjust. Hopefully. If my favorite teachers couldn’t stop me from writing. then my job probably won’t. And it ends in August anyway. I’ll pray for the sweet August free time, I’ll pray that I won’t go crazy from doing nothing after this grueling internship.

I’m Afraid

 

Sometimes I’m afraid that I’ve hit my head so hard and often that I’ll follow Stu Sutcliffe. That my skull has been cracked or dented to the point of sentencing me to death.

There’s a shadow- perhaps more than a shadow- of a thought that the water droplets dripping from my hair are droplets of blood that seep out of my scalp, slip through my hand that holds it, and is dripping downs to my left leg. But I look down and see no red that is not the red of my skin, but even that is worrisome. It’s not the red of a sunburn but the red of an itch that is scratched deeply but still won’t go away.

Perhaps I should shave my legs to be rid of at least some of the itch, or even all of it if I’m lucky. But I worry that the hairs will wriggle alive in the razor-sharp face of their doom. That they will wriggle out of my skin, drop down to the floor, and writhe, writhe in an unwanted living rug that I cannot step on, lest my hairs have souls that are killed by the body on which they once lived.

I am afraid that the birth of this rug will result in my death, directly because my nerves can’t stand losing all of my hairs in one instant, semi-directly because blood chases the hairs, either in such an amount that I collapse and die from blood loss, or in an instant moment where I simply explode from the eagerness of the blood to escape.

What if the blood, my blood, has no such hero-worship for my hairs? What if I’m simply left standing, with a completely bald, sooth specimen of a hyperventilating blood bag?

Perhaps the first person to walk in will see that young, bald, female me has cancer. That I had chemotherapy. Perhaps s/he will send me to the local doctor after finding out that I’ve had no such chemotherapy. Perhaps my bad luck will send me directly to chemo. Perhaps the resulting radiation will give me real cancer. And I will die.

Sometime I’m afraid. I fear that I am crazy for thinking such things. But I’m too afraid to ask.