for emma

my life has too many emmas. Emma Woodhouse, whom i met through Jane in my seventeenth year. She inhabited my holidays, i spent too much time reading about her before term began. It was terrible. She made me love those awful drawing room novels and endless tea and dinner parties so fashionable in the late Romantic era.

three emmas who studied english in london. most importantly Emma Charlton, whose name was a homonym for the street i lived on (spelling was different by just one letter), whose wit was as sharp as a guillotine, whose mind was so brilliant it made me weak at the knees, who asked me if i had read Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (I hadn't. You must, she said, if you are concerned with the detective genre), who asked me, don't you think the genre having reached its end in this book, is fully symptomatic and in fact predictive of the social context in which it was written? i hadn't read that book either, nor knew the context. i was speechless. i wanted to cry in awe.

(ok i confess i can't remember what question she asked me. it was so far ahead of me i couldn't even retain it in my memory. some other time at a play i saw her, waved and smiled. she looked like she wanted to be somewhere else, gave me half a smile and avoided me).

another emma. Emma Yong: my "nemesis". the story is too ridiculous to be tragic, too sad to be funny. i feel it in the pit of my embarassment - boy, that's stupid. But i feel it all the same. i loathe you, but you don't even know me.

at this point i will stop listing the ems and emmas before it gets out of hand.

so, Greeners. did you know my favourite colour is green? In Girl, Dominque Swain is in love with the lead singer of a band called The Colour Green. funny.

so.....

when the sandstorms settle after the season is over much of the land is parched and bruised from the unpredictable interruptions. the herder asked the young apprentice to stay on and help him tend the goats on the allotment near the city in the mountains. the young apprentice said no, i want to see the world wide under this sheltering sky. the herder was angry and told the young apprentice there was no happiness to be found that way.

the young herder became a traveller and journeyed on the walking paths to the sea which ran blue and clear in the bays, and to the forgotten corners where dates grow in sweet plenty. she ended up in the many gated city, itself a gate to the enormous dunes of the desert.

what is a camel? a camel is a pretty thing and an ugly thing at the same time. while taking a long sip of cool water from the fountain near the east gate she met the caravan master with the devious smile and old eyes. a camel is an ugly animal to most, he said, and bad tempered, but so beautiful inside. when we travel, camels drink first, he said, hoisting buckets over to each of the animals he was with, for we are nothing without them. Have you been to the place where the dates grow in plenty? he asked. she nodded. we would never taste those dates if not for the camels that carry them - i personally would never be able to walk and carry any dates, he smirked.

i never noticed camels that much, she said.

perhaps you should, he said. they are everywhere but we never see them.

they spoke a little more but by nightfall he was gone. soon she was tending camels in the city that was teeming with them but which never noticed them. every day she walked past the fountain at the east gate, every day she brushed the camels down carefully and whispered to them to take care on their journeys, and to take care of the caravaners who weren't as talented in the desert. one day while she was giving a stern talking-to to one of the camels for unecessary spitting the caravan master walked into the yard. she stood. he stood.

well, here you are tending camels, how unexpected for you to take my words to heart, he said.

i am a herder, after all, she said. A long pause with the caravaner's long smile.

well, he said, then i don't know what to say.

say, she said, that you want a camel.