The Love Camel Browses the Bookstore

It happened in the bookstore, I think.

The campus bookstore of my new school is entirely different from the one at my undergrad school, which was really more of an underground warehouse, the upper floor having been reserved entirely for flashy alumni merchandise-- the bone handled letter openers and mother of pearl bar sets reserved for those who'd long since "made it" and then grown nostalgic for simpler, budget-noodle-and-beer-bong times. Underground were the books, and an infestation of panicked students decimating the place like wood lice. I always ran smack into the Asians, who burrowed from aisle to aisle with their heads down and their overflowing hand baskets thrust forward like a train's cattle guard. I would dodge, duck, and then dig in the back corners of the shelves for the shittiest copies of the books I needed, the "used" sticker meaning a slightly less astronomical price and occasionally some good research leads scribbled in the margins, or the found poetry of boredom and sleep deprivation. I could never get all of my books at once-- low stock, late orders, a freak rush of English majors, or my own pre-semester, crowd-induced panic attacks ensured that.

But yesterday I went to the bookstore to check out what books I would need for my semester of graduate school. I alloted an hour for this task, and was done in 15 minutes. I walked in, followed the signs upstairs, and found the far wall (not the southeast corner of a massive room) devoted to English, and of that wall, two bookcases devoted to graduate English. The stacks of books were clearly labeled and well stocked, even though school starts next week. I quickly found my two classes and wrote down the titles and authors I needed as well as the bookstore's best price, so that I could later calculate my savings from buying them all used online, and then I straightened up and looked around.

No one was crying. Parents were there. I walked outside, where it was not thirty feet to where I had parked my car for free feeling bemused and optimistic.

Work has gone well. I feel like skills of mine that I like are being put to use-- my eye for graphic design rather than my freakish mastery of alphabetizing-- and my office has a window through which I can check on a mother pigeon who sits cooing softly in her nest of feathers, dried grass, and trash. My morning commute, about an hour each way, allows me to plug in to NPR again and guiltlessly pound coffee as I keep tabs on the all crops (some things in my life have a way of repeating themselves. I had a theory in high school, when I moved a lot and burnt bridges much the way farmers will burn a crop to keep the bugs from spreading, that there were 20 people in my life, they just kept switching bodies and names).

I've been unreasonably excited about work and school recently, and it's not a feeling I'm familiar with. Yesterday, as I was leaving the bookstore, it caught up with me. There's a good possibility that Pants will deploy as soon as late December. If the first semester of grad school goes like any of the semesters I spent in undergrad, I'll put my head down and concentrate and when I next look up, it'll feel like two weeks have passed, but in reality it'll be Thanksgiving, and then in another blink, Christmas.

A very wise friend has continued to harp on me about my concepts of scarcity and abundance in life and love. According to her, I often live like I have savings accounts with finite balances of time, love, and attention, like I think spending love or time on one thing means I necessarily have less to give to another. The idea was so deeply entrenched, and so logical, that it's taken me years and my friend a lot of time and breath, to begin to be suspicious of it.

After all, how does it make sense that if I give a lot of enthusiasm and passion and time to my work and grad school, I won't have less to give to Pants before he deploys? But that's how it works-- even if I was home all day, which we tried with weird and stilted results, the time we'd have together when he came home would still be hemmed in on all sides with whiffs of dissatisfaction and resentment and pressure because that's all I'd be doing: waiting for him.

Looking at it another way, it's also not like I can "save up" on being close to him before he leaves. He'll still be gone either way and it'll hurt either way and neither of us will get any sex for six months either way. You can't be a love camel, in other words, which is such a damned shame I can't even articulate it.

So even as I'm getting all antsy and excited about starting school and going to work, this other cold current is coming under the door, where I feel weird and guilty and sad that another huge thing is coming up, maybe sooner rather than later, and it will not be fun at all. My brother said it best this morning, on the phone from Indiana while his work walkie-talkie crackled in the background: "All you can do is try to be present for all of it, even the suck parts."