A strawberry cream neon heat foam slathered over me in the dark. I could taste the electronic berry, vibrating as dark bubbles burst away.

     Pretend you are not here. Pretend you are down the stone steps to that bathroom in St. Maarten. It is damp and cool and the walls are stone upon grey stone. Does the mask on the wall still frighten you? Can you feel it behind you, polished wood and cut mouth looking?
     I found shards of glass in my mouth there. I don’t think they would have killed me if I swallowed them. I got food poisoning. I could not stand and I could not walk and I remember that the hospital had blue-painted walls and sometimes none at all. I lay on the table with a wall on one side and open night on the other. The windows had no glass. The doctors there wanted to remove my appendix but my mother saw the instruments jumbled in a glass on a table and decided I could die either way. I did not die without the operation.
     I told you to pretend you are not here, but it is I who should not be here. It is I who was in St. Maarten and cannot pretend to be there now, even if I press both arms around the steering wheel and push my head against its airbag center, cursing, wishing, crying.
     It’s hard for me to know where I am. It’s hard for me to keep the memories straight from day to day. When things are good, I am here, I am me in the present tense. But then—and even then, sometimes—I close my eyes because there is some darkness and a tree beside the car I am in on a road in Connecticut three years ago. I can see the lamplit grass and know I am going to dinner at that restaurant by the river, and I will hear the rushing of it as I linger at the entrance, knowing there is a crowd inside.
     Like the other restaurant by the river, Odette’s, with the piano, with wide windows that shook in the storm as ropes of rain swayed down from the eaves. Where was I? Where am I?
     In my kitchen I notice the empty bottle of the first wine we shared. Greek. Nemea. Doesn’t that mean something dark? Like the bottle. Like Medea.

baby reassure

     I look at this picture of us together and think “I’m a baby.” I’m a baby; I ask him for words of reassurance when another woman would be out building her life and not thinking of him at all. Right? Is that love, then? The grown-up kind?
     I forget. I not only forget that I know he loves me, I forget a lot of my own life. It’s hard to keep all the items at the forefront when they all demand full attention. One slides in, fills the screen, and when I am ready to let it slide out, I can’t quite remember what was supposed to come next. He is an easy choice, always an option for the next topic, so he returns again and again as my focus.

     I got some little cakes the other day, and I opened the box today and saw them half-eaten, pretty still, but leaning on each other, smushed together a little. And I thought: This is why we won’t work. These little cakes were alone in their box in my fridge, and they had each other, half-gone and wobbly. They’ll have each other all the way to the trash if I don’t eat them.
     I don’t have that. We don’t have that. Sometimes I think we do, but he doesn’t need me this way!
     I’m actually confused that in a world as perfect and orderly as this one--- because it is, you know, even if it doesn’t seem like it--- it goes on, doesn’t it? It sustains itself beautifully. But in this world, there can be a gap, a hole, an error, a misstep or rather a mispath as long and as perfectly outfitted as this one. Such a perfect illusion. It makes me think that it’s not one, but it has to be. And at the same time it can’t. So I keep thinking that if I just continue to try, it will become real. Is that possible? Does belief make things real, or do they have to be right to begin with? But why would you believe in something if it wasn’t right, at least for you? Do people really make mistakes like that?
     We got so much closer, but now maybe it seems like we are getting further apart. I don’t know if that’s true. Because I still feel closer to him than anyone else. But I can’t be sure that that feeling isn’t more because of me than because of him.

no back in time

nearing independence day

     I’m sitting in the cool, windy sunshine that’s hotter as light, missing home. Home when they were sailing Sunfish. And when I was twelve I used to miss this time also, and ask my mother if she thought that in heaven I might get to live it over again. Cry and insist there must be some way to go back in time. But as I see it now, there’s not, and even if I went back to the place, I’d be stuck there as a woman, maybe with children. I’d have to take care of people; I couldn’t get in trouble, wander off on my own, hide in the woods pretending they were endless, look to someone else to solve all the problems.
     Why did women push for “liberation” again? Children have almost no rights except to be protected, and aren’t they leading the most liberated life of all? Is it more liberating to have responsibility heaped on your shoulders and expectations pulling at your throat or to sit back and have someone stroke your hair, hoping the best for you but willing to step in and take over when you mess up, are too tired, too frustrated to go on. When does this happen again after childhood? And why do people want to be responsible for themselves rather than have someone take care of them?


     Do you get to live it over again? When you get to the end, do you even want to? Every moment, it seems, there could be mourning for the one before, as well as amazement at the present.
     They tell you to close the windows before the sun comes up if you want to keep out the heat. It’s hard to know when the sun is coming, though, and right before it arrives there is the coolest of air, the chill, and you find yourself anticipating that first flicker of heat, needing it.
     Then the sun slips in and burns.

He’s cold in the daylight. Funny, because things are usually warmer then. But that’s when he turns into a robot, an ice-shell, a man who slides cleanly away.

     I want you to tell me that I am horrible and ugly. Someone must do this so I can know that people are still being honest. I need to be hit so I know that the people who don’t hit me really don’t want to.
     You think I sound thoroughly deprived of self-esteem. I don’t think I am, though I think I am quite deprived of common sense. But how can I have common sense when there is so little sense to be made of anything people say or do. And I think about what I do. . .I don’t usually feel like hitting people, but I do often want to tell them to just GO AWAY, and possibly push them. And there are a few that I want to restrain in any way, pin down and interrogate until I get all the answers I want.

“falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling
like the descent of their last end
upon all the living and the dead.” joyce


     When the fan blows the flame on my lighter I am reminded of Demi Moore sitting in that big empty pink room in St. Elmo’s Fire. I know they were in D.C., but it all feels very New York, especially since the perfume I’m wearing reminds me of the scent of those huge flower arrangements at Café Des Artistes. What is it? Guerlain. . . Acqua Gigio. . . the vanilla one. I am not really watching The Dead, a movie Nick loves, which I love also because it is like life, with branches that go nowhere and nothing explained until the very end, but there is nothing to do about the answers anyway.
     It’s funny about the answers, because I think that in a way we know them all along, but we don’t want to hear those answers; we don’t want to live by them. What would happen if we did?
     I found this letter that I wrote my friend Ian about Nick. I never sent it. It was from the very beginning, and the sick thing is that it could still apply --- it could have applied when I was at my happiest with him. Except at that point I still thought that if the bad started to outweigh the good, I’d get out of it. Then again at that point I felt that maybe it was true that I was too good for him: an obvious sign that you don’t know someone very well, because once you know a person is a person, it’s hard to say that one of you is any better or worse or worth more or less. After you know someone really well, you can’t even hate him, because you understand too much.        
That’s a shame. Sometimes hatred is a comforting shield.
     I have always been so glad that I can hear the buses from my apartment. There aren’t enough cars here, and the brakes of the buses—why do they always squeak, buses?—are one sound that reminds me I am in a city, even if it is the wrong one.

     I can tell I am changing because I feel like wearing different clothes, and it’s not just because the seasons are changing. A new style of me is falling over me again, and I wonder what effect it will have. Sometimes it changes everything, like that first yen for a cashmere coat that drove me into Alice Underground and revealed all the clothes from anyone’s attic, the kind of attic I never had. Vintage. Vintage, I hate that word now sometimes because it is so attached to him: wines and belts and Frye boots, you bastard.
     I always woke just as he was leaving; always seeing his back flip out the door, hearing the crunch of the lock. Sometimes he came back, but the backs of his coats must be what I have seen most often: black leather and brown leather and blue corduroy and black wool all walking away from me. I’ve seen his shoulderblades more than his eyes.

     Something is wrong with that and I always knew it. Or perhaps I just should have known. I jumped into a sinking boat, I fear, because I am far too needy a person, and to want to depend upon someone who can hardly give anything can only be a losing proposition. Even if he calls me every day, even if he is cheerful and sweet, it feels sickeningly inadequate. It is loss. It’s funny, because I always clung to the inexplicable bits of him that reminded me of everything in life that I remembered with glowing; all memories of large glass buildings shining bluely at night and the beach laid out alongside the boardwalk in summer. Christmas card shopping with my mother at the huge Hallmark store that used to live ion Fifth Avenue, with its endless cream marble and fresh rows of ribbons, ribbons, ribbons gold and green and silver. All things I cherished and wanted but did not stay in my life, all things I had lost. I should have known that it would only be another thing lost; that I could never expect to have the sudden arrival of one person offer me a key for each locked door of my past.
     And I feel my terrible pity for myself, but at each smack I feel across my face, life prods a small offering of hope at me. I am surprised at how warmly life reclaims me as a lone participant. It has been happening a lot recently, and I have to wonder if there is any divine intent in that. Or maybe life just wanted me all to itself all along. Is it like that? Did it envy my devotion to another person; feel I did not appreciate it alone enough? Is life a jealous partner? Now when I go for a swing in the park, I meet someone friendly and interesting. I never met anyone in a park before. When I have spent a day feeling unwanted, I am telephoned by a friend in desperate need of me. Even the television gives me old movies that feel like home, movies that remind me of times when I felt far lonelier and more hopeless even though I had much more ahead of me. So it seems. I know I have just as much ahead of me now, if I would only start walking toward it.

Winter nights are a kind of thick, scented muslin laid over the streets crushed so close together they hold in warmth like wood reverberating with the voice of Nat King Cole.

He's taking a gold brick and saying it’s too heavy to carry without even thinking of its value or all the things that can be made from it.

Waking

     I know that he was watching me while I was asleep. I had promised to stay awake, but warned that it was a shaky promise, and I woke to see scribbling and an exit. His back out the door.

     He had stared at me for an hour before he left, smoking and hating to smoke, pushing out the smoke through his lips in sharp, abrupt gusts. He decided it was better that I was there, better that he knew me, better than the plan he had once laid out for himself. He is not an artist, but he found me a muse.

     He says I mean more than I know, but perhaps sometimes he forgets, and it is more than he knows.

     I don’t know if it is my job to remind him, or his to learn not to forget.



     You are used to being alone, being alone, being alone. Then to be accompanied is a pleasant surprise. But You are used to being alone: and suddenly your kitchen has double the dishes and one lost fork. Suddenly the toilet paper disappears twice as fast, and even when replaced, it is not your brand. A travel toothbrush gathers condensation in its blue plastic case each time you shower.

     You start to look for things that have changed, suspicious, because so many do that you know that something must be wrong. You keep looking, keep looking. And then you are sick of all this accompaniment; you want to leave your pants laid out on the floor again and your cabinet doors ajar.

     And her face is still beautiful but you have seen it so much that you can hardly see it anymore. All you see are the things she thinks about and does not say, all the things she’s done and all those things you fear she will not do, all the day in and day out and days that don’t seem to belong to you anymore because she’s taking your time, she’s commandeering your friends, she’s taken all your vices and re-lit them for you with extra flame.



     Before I fell asleep I saw his eyes creased with that thinking that is only rarely punctuated with a word. It was cutting all through him; thoughts too blunt and heavy for morning (like that metal that has such weight to mass ratio that you could not lift a cubic foot of it. Lead?) I saw that look and I wanted to talk to him, but my words formed into round sounds of sleep like liquid overtaking my voice. And I did not see the look disappear, but I know the look on his face when he left was still serious-- but satisfied and decided, and hoping that he would return to find me still there like a doll on his shelf.

the letters

     The letters, the letters, the letters. I am behind them even though I am inside them. And I try to use them as an exit but there is no way out; my mind goes round and round because there is no voice to set it free. God has no voice but he has spoken to me in actions, but sometimes I forget to pray, and then what will happen to my prayers? I must tell them.

     Help me. Help me. Help me. I can, but I cannot. I do, but it is not done completely, because the connections in my head don’t work save the one that connects to my stomach: that one pulls and twists and reminds me that I traded everything for this. For this, and is it nothing now? Is it not even my self?

      God, please help me because I have no place to go, I cannot leave my head and it won’t even let me be there. It is too full of doubts to make me comfortable.

     Where did it go? That place where I was, it was warm and I belonged, and I was there only two nights ago. Am I certain I will not be there again?

      I know I will go on and on even if I have no where to be. I know I will find a place, though all the empty in between. But I cannot face the emptiness, I do not want to face the emptiness, I was empty for so long and I cannot live each day being empty again.