Down With Love! Oh! Ewan! Darling! Fly me to the moon, I'm tired of sex, I just want to be married! Red fringed tango dress and swingin' bachelor pad! You're the best friend a girl from Maine who wrote a book and came to New York could have! Renée is ad-or-a-ble. I want to put Ewan in my pocket and take him home.

Look.

Down With Love. Friday morning. You, me, and a large Sprite. Norah and Tiffa. You come too. (Yes, I will call)

P.S. Oh, don't even pull that scene about how much you luuuuuuuv Down With Love, because I have been waiting at least six months for the movie to come out. I have prior claims on Mr. McGregor's pants and Miss Zellweger's wardrobe. So don't even go there, okay?

One of the essential tragedies of this world is that I will never be able to read all the books in it.

Being in a bookstore is torture, like trying to take a breath that will fill your lungs and not succeeding. You can't charge money for books, I think, but they exchange food for dollar bills, so I guess it's about the same. At least for me. I think of books and I can't explain it to anyone who doesn't know already. Lining my shelves, on my floor, half-filled journals, scribbled notes with a quill. Books in English, French, Spanish, Japanese characters like ebony woodcuts down the spine. Whenever I go into a library, it's almost too much, and it hits me in the gut. "I have a phisiological reaction to stories," I explain to my English professor, hoping against hope that he'll understand. It's not melodrama, it's just wanting to swallow books whole. It's falling in love with words like "skinny" and "droop" and "pale, shining" and feeling your head spin. I'm reading Lolita right now, and I am so infatuated with Russian prose right now. On my floor, under my brick-red Old Navy jumper and white satin unmentionables, is The Virgin in the Garden (A.S. Byatt), which I drink like wine, just little sips or it all goes to my head. A plastic, green cup at Shopaholic Takes Manhatten, just like a candy bar. Eight Cousins (I like Rose in Bloom better still) and The Art of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. An old manilla folder of essays and pieces of whimsy. Books overflow near me, on kitchen counters, on the tiled floor, on CD players and on CDs. I will read anything at meals, just need to keep my eyes moving. Catalogs, memos, notes dashed off on a yellow post-it sticker.

There are so many books in the world, it almost seems disconnected. But that makes me happy, so simply glowing scarlet-toe-nail-polish happy, that I don't mind the sadness when I realize that I can't have them all. Because in some strange, childish way, when my fingerprints mark the page, the book becomes written for me.

Perhaps it was, I want to say, but then again, I'll write my own.