Loaded Questions

I have often dreamt of having a den. A little nook in the wall room that I can relax in. It was Book shelves lines with old books chock full of knowledge arranged in conversational manner. And a big comfy chair paddd more like an overgrown pillow in recliner form and the floor has a fur rug on it and the furniture draped with animal hide. When I'm feeling lonely upset or depressed I imagine my room with it's wooked walls and its earth tones, dimmly lit. There's a fireplace and on the shelves between the different book genres there are little glass cases with the oddest little creatures perfectly preserved ready to be studied as if suspended in a moment in their life. There are skulls of critters like skunks and lynx and there are butterfly boxes with large moths and poisonous spiders. And there in the middle of the floor a table with a sinue woven lamp. Next to the lamp a small book on a dead culture or religion as well as a small trinket box made of old newspaper or elephant dung paper compressed into wood panels. It is a music box that plays Fur Elise. in it a small key. A skeleton key that opens some hidden door in the room. The door leads to another excitement. I sit in the chair, wrapped in the skin of a deer, reading about chinese astronomy and I am happy.
I love knowledge, but mine is limited. I have an insatiable desire to learn and sadly, while there is promise of easy access to new knowledge, truely useful and refined knowledge is still hidden between the pages of a book you must pick up and turn page by page to glean from a gem of thoguht, original and new to me.
I am able to look around the room I imagine as being mine one day and see all the creatures suspended in death, and as I look about that room I consider these things as being my best friends in the world. I wish I could tell you about nutty the squirrel sitting there as if holding some scrap of food. or Poe the crow with a shiny chain dangling from his beak, some small charm with latin and egyptian history written all over it. But while I would name these posessions, my personification of their personalities; real from life when they were pets, or imagined, the names I would call them would be far more simple and far more human. Perhaps Steve and Chuck. Manny and Bo. I am almost certain Charlie would be the name of the octopus. Almost always a male name, regardless of sex. But the pet skunk I plan to keep one day, she (or he) will be named flower. (Thanks Bambi)
Love. I think... Is something I consider a threat. Not only to my own imagined creation of the future I pursue to have. But also, it seems historically to my own personal motivations. Every couple years I fall in love. And it is not until I clense my life of the overwhelming desire to nurture another that I seem to be able once again to resume the passion I have for pursuing a better place in this world for myself. I, like all women, desire stability, serenity, the comfort of knowing I am and will be ok. I feel it least when another assumes that burden for me. I know I am strong. Stronger than any suitor I've yet met. And while in moments of darkness and weakness I have leaned on another for support I felt at the time that I had needed; I have discovered in the end, time and again, that no one man or woman (at least not that I've met of befrended yet) can give to me the satisfying feeling of knowing I can rely upon myself, that I am strong and that I can give myself this place in the world that I dream to have.
In the meantime I sleep comfortably, im my mind I am snuggled deep and warm in the pillows of books, wrapped in the skins of animals hunted by my hand for food. And the cardboard box I currently call home, is not soggy with last weeks slush running through the nearby gutter. When I close my eyes, I am warm and dry, in my den, the mansion in my mind where no one can find me and n slumber I can die restfully until the next morning comes around.