When I met you, I was crying, because it was cold. An involuntary response, I would have explained if you'd asked. Fortunately I'm a master, and it is possible that you didn't even notice.

We talked for hours. I learned so many things about you. It is my best trick, to lay myself out as on a blanket at a flea market, so obvious in terms of tarnished and broken and hidden treasures. You couldn't help but pull the trinkets from your own pocket in response, a snowglobe holding a childhood memory, a knife you'd used to cut yourself free. By nightfall I'd wrapped my blanket back up again, stuffed everything into a carpet bag, and you were showing me your scars. It is interesting how quickly one can establish intimacy, when it's needed, how fast we can go from perusing the menu to tearing flesh from the bone. 

I keep thinking about her and wanting to say something that is as deep as her feelings, something worthy of her pain and her sacrifice, her love. And because there is nothing really to say beyond the fact of herself, and nothing more important in my mind, I find myself nearly mute.

She came from the future, I start, because how else could she have continued into a future that offered her little other than one disaster, one rejection, one sad ending after another. How could she have gone on unless it is because she knew she went on. Her dedication to each thing, and failure, and dedication to the next thing, it's almost too much to bear unless I think that like me she sees the future and knows that her dedication will ever be enough but it is what she has to offer, and offer, and offer. Hands crippled by one love nevertheless reaching out in optimism? or certainty? to take up the next goal, purposeful. 

Even in love, I don't begin to understand the strength she had. To love a man who took her name when she took his; it must have felt at the time like she was the equal she knew she deserved to be.  She learned his life so that she could help him lead it; learned his language to help him preserve it. And he listened to her, believed in her, credited her. And yet when I mention her to others she is most famous for how he betrayed her, again and again. 

What would it be like, to watch your husband leave to do work you find important, to watch your son die, to write your daughter cheering letters because it's the only thing you can use to sustain her in prison? What would it be like to know you'd given up your own freedom, things you were promised with ease, in exchange for this? I mean, he won; she won. She had five years of knowing they won, but that whole five years she had to remember all the things she lost to get there. I can't imagine. Or rather I can't stop imagining. 

Going through a massive project of reorganizing all our photos, moving them from photo albums to boxes with little index cards. Nobody goes through these anymore, nobody is that interested in what I was doing 20 years ago that it needs to be in a bulky album taking up massive space. Yet I can't quite throw them out, and there's something about organizing things that makes it okay to keep them. And so here I am, writing in careful ink "Kokura, spring 1990, salarymen playing baseball outside the castle" even while I realize that if I haven't forgotten it yet I probably won't forget it ever; who are these notes for? And yet and yet.

Looking at these I realize I've always been the same, I'm like a tree, you can just read my rings and tell which years were sad and which were happy but in every picture I'm pretty much the same tree, hair longer or shorter, face wider or thinner, in a black tank top and jeans that don't look good at all, or in someone else's t-shirt and baggy pants rolled or cut to my knees, barefoot or boots. My insistence on lace-up shoes despite 20 years in cultures that make me take them off is a little odd, as is the fact that I only started wearing interesting socks about five years ago. My persistent dressing like an overweight stagehand even when I was slammin', and black has never looked good on me, though I feel good in it. The refusal to wear makeup even though everyone told me I would be pretty, because I knew I would not be pretty and I might as well spare myself the effort and the disappointment. I wanted to be menopausal when I was 18, I wanted to be excused from caring fairly early on and it shows, it shows, making faces to break the camera, see I'm not ugly it's just my face. 

And the pictures of other people, whoa. How to label this, to say "here's a person I thought I'd know forever, and now he's dead, or alive but we don't even talk; here's a woman I loved like a sister and now I can barely remember her last name." What it means to look and see how clear it is that I haven't changed, and so why have so many people disappeared, living only in these pictures? Did they change? I suppose people do. Or they get bored with my being the same, the way you can get tired of even your favorite picture if you have to look at it every day.

It is of interest now to watch people my age, women who were especially pretty in particular, but also the men, the sweetly balding men, watching with horror as their youth drains away but for me it is the same relief as a uniform: finally I don't have to decide. Or rather I seem to have decided finally already 30 years ago and now here I am. I could buy alcohol without getting carded from about age 15, which is possibly why alcohol was not particularly alluring for me. And now here I am, not merely the mother in the school play because I look older than everybody else, but the mother in real life and I may still look older than everybody else or maybe I finally look my age, I don't know. I recognize myself in these pictures but not because I haven't aged. The tree gets taller, and it's stronger or it's bowed but it's the same tree. Can you see what I mean? Do you want to see the pictures?

A bed is so good for so many things. To slide between cool cotton sheets on a summer's night. On a winter night, it is pure comfort to get into a bed that is already warm. It is cozy to make a nest of several blankets layered on each other – the fuzzy one that reminds you of childhood slumber parties. The quilt your aunt made. Or it is nice to have a thick warm comforter stuffed inside a soft flannel cover, all that warmth in one sweet weight. It is lovely to have a selection of pillows – the big one for sitting up, the small one for tucking under one ear when you curl catlike around yourself. A big one for pretending. How absolutely luxurious it is to spend almost a third of the day with things that you picked, all the softness and color of your wishes. It is healthy to keep the bed only for sleeping, but it is also, oh such a treat to pull in a thick book, under a light that is just for you, and read until the words slide into your dream and the weight of the book falling across your legs wakes you, and the light is a reach away and you slide down under the covers, the transition from pleasure to pleasure almost seamless. It is a blessing to have a bed of one's own, to wake startled from a dream and feel immediately safe, to say, "Oh, here I am" and know where that is. And while it is delicious to wake with a heavy arm across you, long fingers spread across your stomach, the heat of love, it is also fine to wake for the sunrise, the light filling the room and the whole day in front of you and a good night's sleep behind you. But first you need to get a bed.

And here we are at the foot of the hill, leaned against the boulder, having a cigarette break. The saddest thing about this is now, when you're at the bottom and know you have to go up, that huge distance ahead of you. All that work. Put out the cigarette and throw the filter away responsibly because you don't want to be careless anymore. You don't want to be careless again, ever. Shoulder to the rock and up we go, slowly. Pushing against the forces of gravity. On the plus side your calves have never looked better. Let's think about those things for a while, the things on the plus side. On the plus side there's time to think. On the plus side it beats having nothing to do. When you get to the middle you can take another break. The saddest thing about this is now, when you're in the middle and you can't help but start to feel optimistic and glass-half-fullish even though you know how this ends, how it always ends. Well best not to focus on how things end. Best to get back to work. The journey is the destination, they say, and the journey is up, and up is always good. Better air. Nice view. And the struggle itself towards the heights, etc. Push, pause, a handhold, footing. Push, pause. And now we're at the top, and for a moment there is birdsong and endless possibility. For a moment a deep breath of pure air, of how sweet things could be all the time if you could stay here. The saddest thing about this is now, for a moment, when you've let your chest fill with hope. And then it all comes down. Rolls over your toes, smashing, hurts. Suddenly the only view you can see is how everything you worked for has ended. The saddest thing about this is now, when you realize that nothing you've done so far counted, and your toes worse than stepped on. No time for that though; now it is time to begin again.

And here we are at the foot of the hill, leaned against the the rock of our particular ages, having a cigarette break. What has been done to deserve this? No: what have you done to deserve this? You don't remember? You told a secret that wasn't yours to tell. You thought too highly of yourself. You didn't want to die; you didn't want anybody to die. Well who's a naughty naughty then, eh. Put the cigarette out and throw the filter away responsibly and take a second to think about this: You don't actually have to do this. You could stop investing muscle and bone and thought and tears into this. You could give up. You could walk away. And this is the saddest part, really, this part here. When you have to decide between thankless labor and possible boredom. When you have to choose whether to risk yourself in hope or in the unknown. Listen, don't look at me; I've got my own rocks to push. Busy busy busy.

Did that happen or did I dream it? Did I in fact run my hand across the top of your head, the scritchy softness of your short hair like a cat or some other soft creature. Did I talk to you for hours and hours while spilled beer dripped into my lap, noticed and ignored. Was there something sweet at the end. Did we share water like Michael Smith and Jubal Harshaw, but better because in this story women are not objects, or not always. Did I have the same conversation with someone over and over, where he was white and trying to talk like a gangster and I was white and offended but trying not to be because I also was young, once, a long time ago. Did somebody hand me my cell phone when I dropped it. One can make such a good first impression but then somebody not you or me fell down the stairs, laughing. I have not lost so many ideas since 1995 I think. Flying out of the brain cave of my mouth like bats, they were, and some were voiced and some flew under the sonar. How I wanted to say you were beautiful. Someone kissed my neck and I thought: Now I know what to remember; I will remember this, this is when I was last kissed. Then he fell down the stairs, laughing, and a man from a seventies poster of a movie about pimps carried him back upstairs, a cotton scarf that looked like animal skin. The last time I fell in love was twenty years ago and the last time someone fell in love with me was never but love itself is not hard to feel. How things can sparkle: the stars; the window reflecting the moon; our eyes.

recently constricted
formerly wound-up
beyond tightened
departed grammar
previous suspense

 It seems to me that a lot of people who break up immediately start repairing or improving the things about themselves that were, if not the cause of the break up, certainly a lightning rod for the fights. Quit smoking, finally start therapy, go to the gym, talk about their feelings, whatever. I'm not sure what the motivation is. Wouldn't you like to take advantage of your freedom from the badger, carp, grouse, shrew, hen-pecked past to finally be what was more important to you than being loved? Or is the point to prove that you could change any time you wanted, any time at all, but you just were never going to change for that person? Check out how I brought these big scissors with which to remove my nose from my face. I'm not just talking about one person; I'm talking about everybody. I'm talking about form; I'm talking about content.

I said you meaning me. I said she meaning me. I have noticed that it is easier to stay in first person when I am not angry. I'm sure it means nothing, she said.

I read something I wrote the other day and every sentence started with a little qualifier. It seems to me. I think. In my opinion. To be fair, the sentences were all observations, not facts, but still: every. single. sentence. This is not actually because I am tentative at all, but because I feel so absolutely sure that it scares me, and I need to tell myself out loud that it is possible that other opinions exist. At least I'm pretty sure. 

I'm over the jet lag almost entirely but at night I have to anchor my hands so they don't keep talking. Shoved behind my head, wedged between the headboard and the mattress, tied together with a scarf. They want to flitter about, commit a crime, tell a story about that one time, touch your face along the jawline. They will not be still: small flightless birds. Shhh, I need to sleep. Last night I dreamed about coins falling from my eyes and they were all expired currencies.

The thing about being single is you don't have to worry about Valentine's Day. The thing about being single is that you have to remember how to behave. The thing about being single is it's harder to play games. The thing about being single is that you can pick something up and put it away and it stays put away until you get it out again. The thing about being single is that you don't have to restrict your singing to the shower. 

It is harder to be back from Costa Rica than I had hoped, but easier than I had dreaded. I feel like… restored. I can work again, write little lists and expect to accomplish them, make eye contact. I didn't realize how unwell I had been until I had time to recuperate. I expect that flying south for the winter is not a thing I should save merely for crises, but a habit I should adopt.