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.