About a week afterward, I dreamt of entering the hotel room where we fucked and finding it empty of you but full of books that you'd read and left behind. There were at least a dozen, and under dream logic it didn't seem strange that you would have read so many in only three or four days. It made sense to me that you had, and that you would read fiercely and fast and leave behind what was finished. I didn't remember the dream as a dream and so it burrowed somewhere deep in my brain and became part of the way I understood you. It was months before I was able to extract it and identify it as an impostor truth. How had I failed to square it with the real fact of your enormous library? How had I ever thought it possible that you could be so unattached? I once asked these questions aloud to a friend and she stared at me, eyebrows flat, and said: The books are you. That's what the dream's about.
I hate that kind of clarity.
