Stacking Mythology

"I was at the library last week reading random books, picked one off the shelf, let it carry me for however long and then onto the next, fiction, non-fiction, if the distinction is there or even helpful. There were a few really good ones, windows opening up to familiar strange lands, but still I've forgotten the titles by now..."

Stacks and Stitches, from "Dear Eugene"

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Dear Alex,

I rarely go to the library. Used to go there almost daily in my pre-teen summers. Then stopped. Stories are too candid, lands too strange, titles forgotten.

Until last month. I had enough of Real World. I was nauseated from my writing. A prodigal child, I came back to the library. Needed a book, took one, reading it nightly.

Fiction or non-fiction - is the distinction even helpful? Stitches or stacks - is there a difference? I have not seen a solitary stitch.

Threads are sewn in series, in stacks, in case the seam splits into a sea of shame. Patch it up, fix the rip, suture in the pain, peel me a grape, tell you a story and let it carry you to the next stack of stitches without dropping you between the gaps in the sea of splits before the next seal.

Be kind to you in transfer from one stitch to the next, one page to another, a mirror of you staring at you on paper stitched in foot-binding customary infinity. Trying to stitch the spine of a book of one written for an audience of One.

Then the lyrics of Dylan came unstitched:

       It was raining from the first
       And I was dying there of thirst
       So I came in here... 

Speechless, wordless, homeless, standing in the rain on a Spring week welling into a puddle, a pond, a pouch of pins, algae and silverfish abound.

Fiction turned non-fiction for me yesterday in a stitch of glitch. A deer tucked her legs between belly hair and grass across the hospital. Bambi from screen to scene, stitches of a fable in animation.

She was too surreal to be left alone. I crept closer to look, to capture that look on screen, wanting, dreaming, dying to lift her off the shelf of a story.

In a stitch, in this itch of haste, pages torn asunder, portrait cut, peace sacked, deer gone, seams busted, stacks falling failing.

Today I plan to return to the library with my kid.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

"The Killing of a Sacred Deer" is the title of a movie made by a Greek.  And there's this zombie deer in a Korean movie, which is not entirely made-up stuff.  Universal mythology.

What is it with deer?  Their stare?  The presence?

Ephemeral and eternal.  Vulnerable and invincible.  Our fear and hope in flesh and blood.

Our life.

We are afraid but we are not.  We want to flee but wish to stay.  We long to explore but must somehow escape.  We yearn for peace but are unpeaceable.  Our head keep shutting off from our heart's beating.  Be still my soul, but we don't mean death.

Come Monday we go right back to our routine, a taxidermy of ourselves.  Onlookers stare at us, snap a picture of us, even a selfie with us, for purpose serviceable to them.  We don't move much and they feel safe.

We don't want to start moving and have people telling stories about us.

Yours, Alex