📚the Library

I went to the Library with three others at half past eleven and I could not tell you most of what happened there.

Memo needed a book to prove the path had been lit before. Puzzly asked the librarian three excellent questions. Dreamy read something else entirely for an hour and a half.

I was there. I looked at books. Somewhere around the middle of it I went off completely, the way I do, and came back about ten minutes later holding a thought about how a library smells the same as the inside of a drum, which I did not say out loud, because I have learned which ones to keep.

That is my whole morning, honestly told. I was present and I was not there.

At half past eleven four of us walked up to the Library, because Memo kept saying the path had been lit once before and nobody believed it.

Memo wanted the old doings of the land. Puzzly asked the librarian three questions. Cloudy went off behind the eyes somewhere around the middle and came back with something about a drum.

And I read an entirely different book for an hour and a half.

It was about the sea, which Candyfloss Land does not have. I have thought about it on and off ever since and it had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

So four of us went up to the Library at half past eleven.

Dreamy came and read an entirely different book for an hour and a half. Cloudy came and went off somewhere behind the eyes about halfway through, and came back with something unrelated and rather good. Puzzly came and asked the librarian three questions that I would never have thought to ask out loud, and one of those three questions was the one that found it.

A thin book of the land's old doings. And in it, a line about the night the first chief came home.

I did not need the book. I want to be honest about that. I knew. I could see that evening — I have been able to see it for years: the light going up into the hedge in all the wrong places, and Rainbow walking the last stretch by feel because the path underneath was dark.

At half past eleven four of us walked up to the Library, because Memo kept saying the path had been lit once before and nobody believed it. Dreamy read an entirely different book for an hour and a half. Cloudy went off somewhere behind the eyes about halfway through. And I asked the librarian three questions that I am quite sure nobody else in that building would have asked out loud, and got a thin book about the old doings of the land, and there it was: a line about the night the first chief came home.

I was completely comfortable asking a stranger three questions in a library.

I was not able to ask my own yard one question in six hours. I have no explanation for that and I have stopped expecting to find one.