Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems

Yesterday was not a fun day.

When I woke up, the first thing I felt was a nice ache in my foot. That's because when I went for a jog the day before in the little woodsy area behind my dorm, I tripped on a rock and tweaked something in my foot. So I woke up not very happy. And then, brilliant person that I am, I wrote down my home phone number instead of my cell number on a job application...let's just say things aren't looking too good in terms of employment now.

At the end of the day all I wanted to do was read a good book. Do you ever actually crave a book? I do. Some people go home and all they want to do is eat some ice cream and go to sleep. Yesterday all I wanted to do was go to my dorm and read some Emily Dickinson. Yes, I'm a dork. That's what this blog is about: literary dorkiness and how awesome it is.

Lucky for me, my roommate is taking a class on poetry, and even luckier, one of her textbooks is a flimsy little thing called "Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems." She doesn't need it for a while, so I borrowed it and took it with me today to read in between classes.

I think the last time I sat down to read a book for fun was when I read Bel Canto right before I took off. That was a good read, but there's always something totally comforting about reading a book where you already know what's going to happen, when you know it so well that all you need is a little prompting and you can remember exactly what happens in a chapter or, in the case of Emily, read a first line and know exactly what the last one is before you even turn the page. So today I sat in the common room outside the bookstore and read for an hour before I had to go to class, and it was the best idea I've had in a while.

Sometimes when I read all of the words start to blur, and I finish a page without even knowing what I just read. That happened today, but it was ok because I just felt what they meant. It's weird to say, but it's true. You can look at a painting and know it's a Degas just because of what the paint looks like; it's the same with Dickinson. I can read a stanza and I know it's her writing-- it's that unequivocal style and the random dashes and line breaks that remind me what I'm doing when I get eaten up by comfy chairs and incessant thinking.

So today has been a better day, partly because my foot isn't quite so annoying (though I do still hobble around like a viejita after I have to brave the staircases), and partly because I got to take an hour off and just do something that I know. It's like sitting in your favorite place in the world-- when you're there you're fine, and when you leave, you know everything will still be fine because you're taking a piece of that place with you for the rest of the day.