It was a long, busy week followed by a long, busy weekend. And not just normal busyness–it was the sort of busyness that consumes not just your time, but your mind, your heart, your sleep, your…well…pretty much everything.

For me, there’s only one sure-fire method for recovering from that sort of busyness: a very long, very hot bath with a very tall stack of books sitting on the hamper beside the tub. If you were there (heaven forbid!), you’d be able to tell my state of mind by looking at my reading material. If I just needed to unwind, I’d be reading a non-fiction book, probably about writing or some aspect of spirituality. If I was tired out, I’d be reading a light YA novel by an author whose writing I wanted to study, or some other story I’d been meaning to get to. But if I was really, really unravelled, I’d be immersed in bubbles and my own personal literary “comfort food,” those books with landscapes as familiar as the back of my hand, with characters as real as memories, with plot lines so intertwined with the fabric of my childhood that it’s almost impossible to tell where the the story ended and my life began. As if writers ever make that distinction.

Last night, I busted out “The Last Unicorn,” which is macaroni salad, Betty Crocker brownies, and Liberian collard greens all rolled into one. Oh, the memories attached to this saga! Going to the library with my mom when I was tiny, and choosing this video over. And over. And over. Sitting on the living room floor at our house on River Road, watching Schmendric turn the Unicorn into the Lady Amalthea on our brand new video cassette player! Finding a tattered copy of the book at a secondhand store when I was a teenager, and being completely captivated by the mysterious, spidery inscription inside the front cover:

Mary

Perhaps you will find an entertaining story in these pages–perhaps much more

Perhaps a Unicorn

Was it a wise old aunt or grandmother who scrawled those words? Or perhaps Peter Beagle himself?

The book is older than I am, the binding frayed, the cover creased, the yellow pages crumbling around the edges. Mary’s book is mine now, one of my most treasured possessions, and I don’t think the inscriptionist would mind. I found the Unicorn.

The Unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night…

*sigh*