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.