to sit opposite to (and other measurements).

i wish it was possible, unequivocally, to know when i was wrong. it's those sneaking times when i don't want to be. when i'm under the highway on my bike. when i am full of electric needles (literally--not poetically). those times are harder, to say/admit it. to feel my wrongness, the sparks and bits of its mysterious and enigmatic origin and trajectory. and then what?

i want to conduct studies, measure randomly. i could use gmail word searches as a form of divination. first, we will travel to new zealand. other forms of divination include thunder, birds' flight patterns, smoke, ash, and mirrors.

(when is it your turn? they ask. they mean babies. i say, probably never, just to see how it sounds and then what the third thing said will be).

he draws it in pen, how i am a wolf. i see that wolf-like glimmer in the mirror when i lock myself in the bathroom. when i pretend to be captivated by the yard.

i ask the I-Ching blatantly profound and impossible to really answer questions just to see what it will say. it says: union.

i still have sand in my shoes from when we drove out of the city.
on saturday we sat in the alley with our beers and the tin signs on the brick walls and i said, 'tell me something you are thinking about.' and he did.
i crawled into bed and i said, 'tell me a bedtime story.' and he did.

ex. of one possible study (our lapses):

6 min (mine)

33 min (his)

10 min (mine)

9 min (his)

11 min (mine)

6 min (his)

21 min (mine)

11 min (mine)

5 min (mine)

18 min (his)

21 min (his)

6 min (mine)

6 min (mine)

in looking carefully over this data i wonder what it could possibly mean that i feel as if i am always waiting for him to speak (write).

a search for obsession draws these results (in order):

-i'm kind of obsessed with that song.

-i'm obsessed with those Brontë sisters.

-he's a sex obsessed prick.

-i was never obsessed with that prison break show.

-i'm obsessed with her and i don't even know her.

-i'm obsessed with the desert.

-i was obsessed with being honorable.

-i'm obsessed with my so-called life.

-i am wildly (and i mean wildly) obsessed and in love with him.

-i enjoyed it and i feel borderline obsessed.

-i am obsessed with it in some ways.

-i am OBSESSED.

-i don't know why i am obsessed with this.

-a guy who is obsessed with having sex in graveyards.

-i am obsessed with this for you.

-i am obsessed with my novel.

-i have been obsessed with apocalyptic things.

-i am obsessed with drowning and images of drowning.

-i have been making a list of my obsessions.

january 29th

good thing there is a country between us. oceans (depending on which way you face). continents.

'do you see that?' i ask and point at the map. 'it's a continent.' but i hesitate, and wonder if it really is.
yes, it's a continent. we were born on different ones.

also january 29th

a. and i get a lot for our money. we stand up all night and the lights make our drinks blue and there are no cute boys, except ones that look way too young for us, wearing beanies and leaning pensively, and it's loud. i'm not being coy about my age, i just think i might feel that way for the first time. like, it's been 15 years since i saw a david lynch movie. we took the train all the way into new york, and on the way back everyone asked, 'what does it mean?" now i'm watching twin peaks and it's good and i guess i just think my brain is a bit different now, 15 years later. things aren't serious, but they can be. endometria. the profound mysteries of our bodies. oh, the theories. primrose oil and omega 6 and dandelion. the earth actually offers these things up to us. it's remarkable. 'i'm not, like, thinking this for the very first time,' i often have to disclaim. but, nettles. and red raspberry. it sort of blows my mind if i think about it a certain way. a certain way, for the very first time.

'i mean, he loves you,' she says. 'he had to get really far away from you.' there is a lot...that i sort of don't mind/hope this is true. that there are other things about life besides everyone loving everyone forever. there is france. there is death. there are concerts. there is yoga class. there is coincidence. and luck. there is football. there are presidential elections.

i also just mean girls my age are having babies and i can't even wear the right dress for the wind or the weather or the part of town and three men walk by and say, 'nice legs.' then, 'nice ass.' then, 'are you going to the airport?' thanks, thanks, no. standing up high, above the palm trees, i read henry miller because i'm early, his essay about sea voyages and being outcast. this part of town is gray and expansive, seemingly abandoned, sprinkled with palm trees.

another day: is everything a love note? every gesture, and each taste? probably.

when i think of him i want to buy really expensive nightgowns and wear them in empty rooms that don't have furniture yet. by this i mean dream logic.

anti-love note: i don't begrudge you love. i mean, of course i don't.

january 30th

'are you on e right now?' he texts.

i'm invoking slumber parties.

i'm noticing which trees have been cut down.

which parts of the road are in need of repair.
why wouldn't i be like this?

me: you're not out and about by any chance, are you?
him: i am, doll.
me: i kind of wish it was 2006.
him: i kind of hate being a grown-up.

i found secrets written in early january of my 2011 planner while i was looking for something else. they were marked with post-it notes and they took my breath away.

next, i search for LEAVE, STAY, and RESOLUTION (and sweet/kiss/fuck).

-do it or try to stay strong to my arbitrary vow?

-trying to stay (calm/busy/happy/warm)...these four, alternately.

-we can leave it at that.

-obeying my resolutions.

i have this little pink book from portugal. in it i keep track of excess and moderation. i have written the year (it's 2012) and some hearts on the cover. on certain pages i feel the need to distinguish reality from provocation and vagueness. i will, for example, really have someone look at my teeth (soonsoonsoon). i am making collages of blue cohosh. other things are just the tectonic psychological rumblings. the pitfalls of no matter what. i will make an appointment to get a haircut. i will drink a million cups of tea a day. i will remember my dreams.

a search for story:
-every story is a love story.
-my choice of story is a bit morbid perhaps.
-i need to tell you a story and then you need to tell me i'm crazy.
-new and improved spy story.
-an anecdotal story.
-there is a story always ahead of you.
-the realm of story.
-a failed story.
-the latest story in our minds.
-i know that story.
-my damn demon story.

yesterday:

this boy runs up to me and he says, 'do you know about astrology?'

he is sort of cute so i stop and i say, 'sort of.'

'my girlfriend says she is all fucked up because mercury is in retrograde. have you heard of that? what should i do?'

i look at him and don't really know how to answer. 'yeah, i've heard of it. i think it does fuck people up sometimes.'

on the other side of the street a funeral is letting out.

'she bought crystals. do you know what crystals will do?' he asks.

'um, i guess not really,' i say, though i could guess some obvious things about what crystals might do.

i want to tell him i've been inclined to wear my more hippie-ish earrings lately. that there is something bigger than all of us. that last week a man pressed lavender oil to my forehead with his thumb right hard in the center.

that everything sort of seems totemic and violently important. that he should look up at the sky, right this second, at its splattered patterns and fickle prettiness, that soon it will be february, that this girl he loves can't be serious, that i am a capricorn, but that it also matters where the moon was when you were born, and so that's a whole other thing.

'ok, thanks anyway,' he says and runs away.

even non-fiction.

1-writing stories is a way to be with someone. it's a way to feel affection. affection is the only word that seems right. affection is what i feel, like i created him. any way that he feels soft or is kind. any way that he loves her. i think it's my doing, after all. just this morning i took away his reservations. i made her lift her dress above her head. this, just after breaking into the empty mansion, the ocean crashing outside the window. i made them do that and in that way i felt him.

(also, i walk by this window display in the morning on my way to work. there is a giant quartz. a red dress. a fur coat. the store never appears to be open. i also walk by a swing someone has strung from a tree branch over the sidewalk. and road construction. and a confusing art gallery. and where the men play dice. and where the cook was shot on his cigarette break. i think about him a lot.)

2-the cab driver sang me a song. he didn't know my name and he sang, "Laura..." he said, 'i hope it isn't serious.' he said, 'how is your love life?' i wish there was a way to track why i remember certain things later. why i remember them crossing fillmore in a part of town i'm only ever in when i go to the doctor. i go inside the store with its white floorboards and i pick up tiny shoes the size of my palm and the woman eyes me and i want to tell her, 'you have no idea. and neither do i.' later when i tell the story, i tell it like he was psychic, and another man i barely know sings my name and laughs, and the sound of it...i don't know. the sound of my name inside these unknown voices, in song. and i hope it isn't anything serious. serious serious serious.

3-'well, you're so young,' she says. and here i thought i was full of dust.

4-even paul newman had an affair somewhere inside that happy 50 year marriage. butch cassidy and the sundance kid is a really good movie. we all do a lot of different things over the course of our years.

5-what a dumb word it is, sadness. what a thing to not foresee. being a widow. or what treachery it will be. the mistake, of course, will be your own.

6-here is the thing about rain. you can be outside in it. you can be inside. 'take those off,' he says. always, i want to feel closer. i wake up inside a video. inside a letter. i thought so hard about writing letters last night that i thought he would have written me one while i slept and it would be waiting. but what i'm forgetting is autonomy. bad-ass-ness. how it feels to dance.

7-this song.

8-these lyrics: and this i remain.

9-i don't know where i am (san francisco. or: at work. walking home, in the movie theatre). what day it is (tuesday). how old i am (33). i feel like i am floating. like i am wearing second hand cashmere. like i am a silly girl. like i am psychic too. trivial. a hermit. an ant. depends when you ask me. one day i am scoffing at gifts, the next i'm admitting what no one else can. what wisdom. 'you can't be serious,' he writes in the margin.

10-'are you psychic?' i ask the cab driver. 'yes,' he says. 'is this the future?' i ask the man who checks me in. 'yes,' he says. i meant to tell him i was kidding. how for five whole fucking minutes i cared so deeply about that video game. the magazine for overweight women. the women around me, far sicker. far more experienced in these things. actually growing life. actually closer to the end, but only technically.

11-an example of my lack of professionalism. 'i appreciate the messages of the universe,' i say. these messages pop up and i respond furiously. these conversations seem vital.

12-what i look up on the internet. 'only work related things,' i say. advice and love notes and witty banter. maybe he's doing it for me. my equilibrium. to remind me that, either way, i am skin and cells and cycles and wholeness. to remind me that, either way, it isn't about us. not mostly. the kind of patience he means is patience so profound and enduring, it's not even close to the kind of patience i have. maybe he means to tell me that what matters has already been said, and that what happened still exists, cannot be taken back, ghosts of a sort. to want anything else is to miss the point, to be seeking punishment. i guess many (most) things are for their own sake entirely. what is it that we really build or wait for? it is the joy, now, of typing these words. it is the walk, this morning, trying to angle my knee over my wobbly ankle, looking at it all again. it is not what will happen or did.

13-my position on pornography.

14-what i borrow and lend.

15-he knows the tone he is setting. he knows the opportunity.

16-i have this czech necklace. i rarely sleep in jewelry, but sometimes i do. i went to see this assassin movie alone, and it had certain interesting qualities. i think i probably won't ever watch another horror movie. i bought junior mints. i don't usually buy junior mints. i rode the bus. i forgot i hate the bus. i often remember the moment we were robbed. someone might just yank something from your hands. it happens all the time. not just near seas and volcanoes, though that has long since stopped being a memory. i've sort of been paying attention to the primaries. i have this tiny planner that barely anything can fit inside. the impracticality of it seems very important to me and i carry it everywhere, to meetings, where i mark down things that i would remember anyway and write numbers into the blank months and feel good that things are happening.

17-'beautiful ass,' he tells me.

'the cervix appears unremarkable,' the report says.

18-being in love is scary. it depends what kind of in love, but most of them are pretty scary. we talk till the candles burn down about our lives, and our husbands, and our writing, and children, and being creative. i say certain things out loud for the first time. though the saying can't alter actual objects or travel through time, it does i think slough off some unnecessary skin.

19-daydream is the wrong word for this morbid shit.

20-and this song.

21-and this is what i mean tonight. i hesitate more these days because i feel what i mean changing and fluctuating so much. it depends on my surroundings, on what music i'm listening to, what i'm wearing, what else has happened. it feels like such a wild impermanence of thought. one day convinced, and the night an anxious rush of, no, not that, and sleeping, and then the morning. it's not unpleasant, just unmoored, directionless, air, softness, a rush, a turned around, like i've been spun, like i have powers or timelessness. like i'm the girl in his song, or the title of the noir movie after the football game. a name that was chosen those years ago. not inside most of the time of this world, and now, such fuss, such talk, such muddle, such wonder.

the weather where you are.

any story told twice is a fiction.

-grace paley

first, an assignment.

i was reminded of civilization. then the names of roads and months.

there are things i'm trying. revolutionary vs. "supposed to..."

i wanted to tell him it's raining here, where i am, and probably will be for the next week or so. i am aware he must get cold and then warm himself again. i haven't thought about it much beyond that. his weather, i mean. snow, or at least colder than here.

lately i wear socks and turn the heater on.

dreaming in my sleep of our dark house. carpentry. a domestic scene. the concerns one must share. chores, and where the water is getting in. how the door sticks. what we will eat. how the wax gets on the wall or how it is time to go to sleep. the portrait and where it came from. how the mantle might crowd. my line of shoes, diagonal, toes pressed to wall.

i cannot build floors, but i can paint them purple. i cannot find a new voice. i looked up indelible though i already knew it had something to do with permanence (which nothing is, he tells us, as we hang upside down every wednesday night stretching out the place where our hearts should go). there was another word, and my impatience, and three pages later i wonder...was the word inchoate? no. i forgot to look it up. i think of my ribcage like a nest. it's all ego. caring what is held there. caring about its beat, how it might sound to you, thudding there.

i have painted my toenails red. i have written this in five variations of more and less intimate. it keeps not being about what it's about. celebrity divorce. decisions about______. less intimate now.

we must have known that we were young then. that this was the very first time.

and now, when he googles himself, he is dead.

he was sorry for how it went, i think. the t-shirt of his was pale and thin. it rained that whole entire year. i was eighteen and had learned to wear eyeliner right.

rumor has it he owns a sun room, and lets things happen as they may.

we choose the same scenes to photograph. we are both spiders, and though we've fled far, those are still the winter scenes we prefer. i'm not sentimental, but i can see right through him. see the vines in him. perhaps it's not mutual, but i stay far away just in case.

we are talking about mouths. kissing with them. we are talking about beds. the photos underneath them in a shoebox. we are both not talking about the same thing, right? that same thing being each other.

in addition, there is the future.

rivers (which ones? she asks. rush, i say. i'm hesitant. names of rivers are the sort of thing i don't know). i also don't know many of the nuances of the civil war.

near escapes brush by me, a cold wind or bullet glance.

platonic wrists.

first dates.

'come meet me,' i say into the phone, my umbrella blowing inside out.

there was a time.

that's the wrong phrase. five thousandth date. salsa and christmas lights and the rain all glowy through them and bets with the universe and laughing because we already made up our mind.

for example: the dark fifteen minute drive to the quick-e-mart. each thing ached. tree. ditch. fluorescence. me. we drove that way so many times. by ponds, by bridges, by apple orchards, by baptist churches. it was wasted on us, or it wasn't. or we've never let it go. it made us, bit by bit.

for example: he got old enough to live in a house. to have a wife. websites.

'i don't have the kind of passion you do,' he said, but he had no idea. his head would explode.

in his letter he told me that he understood my obsession with the pacific. it was OK, and i should go there and i should swim in it. now i live beside it, a thing neither of us saw coming probably, though we weren't looking very hard. we were daydreaming our church brawls, weren't we? we broke into mansions, but they were empty inside. the gates to the driveways were locked, but the beaches were open, a strange oversight. i remember things that didn't happen.

i didn't put any of this in my diary. 'that's not why i'm here,' i write under the date. i think usually i write the wrong date. i wrote january 20. that was yesterday. i want to have other concerns. not first loves. not revolvers. i leave a pillow on the street for him.

'you decide, and i'll say yes,' i say.

black stockings and crushed velvet.
twin bed.

a borrowed dress, a cardigan in a paler shade.

i had a dream of three love letters. i laid them side by side. one discussed dancing, how our bodies fit together. one had charts and arrows. one was written by a man i couldn't remember.

i do ballet while i wait for things to toast. i'm famished. it's all so obvious. delicious.

'three different people?' he asks and laughs at me.

('this is where we sleep,' she told him and she pointed to the bed. and he knew it was over. seeing someone's bed will do that. their life without you, they are trying to say.)

he said, 'you still cause trouble for me. don't i for you?' i forget if he really said that or if i answered. us so busy wishing for the happiness of the other. that basement floor, the pull-out couches. the marriage proposals, stripteases, and mythologies. even a decade later he wouldn't leave me there with anyone else. did we grow up outside? literally, in the woods, on the roads, climbing in the windows of the mills. at some point before we were born those mills stopped functioning. the polo field. the car crash bridge. the haunted one. the junk yard.

it was march. it was december. i'm fairly certain it was summer--july. it lasted years. he called parties where i was. people came calling my name, with the phone hanging against the wall, back when no one had a cell phone and he just had to tell me. i think that he wasn't coming there, and i shouldn't expect him. i think he was calling to ask, how dare i?

it would take me so long. so, so long. how dare i was a good question.

first, i'm supposed to remember a person i barely knew. this is when we were experimenting with jail. dying. channeling ourselves. writing prophecy. bathtubs. that house is a real estate office now, with the same roof and white shingles, with the same perfect party porch, and a sign with green letters, and the same yard.

he hurled himself from cars. liked it. but what could he do to help me? my subconscious has forsaken him.

even running up the mansion stairs and busting open the secret rooms and unearthing the coffins, there is nothing to discover here.

days are quick and complicated. sometimes it's all you can do. i find myself very far away from it. not indelible after all, and maybe i wished it was. still, i've left things out. getting out of bed in his apartment that never grew familiar to me, the one where he lived when i finally left him. i picked up his paintbrushes and i think i pushed the bristles to my face in the dark. i knew i was on my way out.

and a lot more happened after that.

i grew up on a road called rock mills. then black haw. if i only had six words one of them would be california. i'm working on the other five. a long, "oh," like in the song. light.

i don''t know enough about meteorology. velocity.

i don't know how to say, 'if you go...'

i don't know how to think of it, or if to think of it at all.

stand still.

i always have the best intentions of resisting you.
but you show up in my dreams and drug me with something where the dose goes from a needle into my eye. it carves what i see into delicate red lines. you tell me, 'i think i'm going through a phase.' you tell me that in the dream but you must mean it in real life too.
your novel isn't out yet.

i'm fairly certain this dream means i need to write more. put everything else away. or it might be about how we argued about the right angle for a tattoo that is text. i remember the first time i saw your chest with that written across it. we were in a cab and you'd come back. it was november and you were wearing a sweater and i must have seen one of the higher letters. the d maybe.

oh, pre-rain valencia in the morning.
her name. and mine.
hearts hanging from the telephone wires.

just because i think this doesn't mean i wish it. i know about the neck and every tilt of it. and what the tilting means. i know what i'd be willing to give up in an instant.

oh, and there is also everything i know about dying.
it's an interesting side effect though, isn't it? you didn't mean to show how much it meant, or what it might reveal. but it did. it seemed like something little and it peeled back, then peeled back some more.

i think i might be in love with henry miller. imagine you could order the world, he said. what would you really do? respect the privacy of the other person's soul and then you will know how to love them. i like reading his words out loud at midnight before we watch the daily show on my computer.

'listen,' i say to you.
'what do you think it means?' you say.
your head is on my lap and i can picture your private soul like this crackling, burning, circular, magical, wild, and encoded thing. so it means that.

it isn't enough to be happy.
i love indecipherable french movies if i'm in the right mood. chandeliers and dresses with lace backs and murder and gardens where the shadows are cast the wrong way and monologues in french detail the waiting, passion, death.

i took a series of polaroids of the ocean and the sun and you. they all developed into a spectrum of blue before fading to a pale yellow. we walked along the beach, along the graffiti of bison, along the tide coming in like we always do. we face south toward the glittering beauty of all that pollution. everyone has always thought doom was coming. the surfers so far out, but only up to their knees at the sandbar. living in europe between two world wars. either i can get my money back or frame all eight of them, in varying degrees of their faulty development, a thumb print, the shadow of your profile, what should have been the sea.

'what are artifacts?' he asks.
'why did they bury weapons in their graves?'

put everything away for an hour. even my writing. the pursuit that gives me my shape and my meaning. scan my brain for dreams in the morning. cork my sedatives. i pour wine on our house plant. it doesn't get better than this still life: pasta on thrift store plates of sunbursts, wine with a pretty font, my computer with my spy story up on the screen. i'd also made a list to include the 18th floor, and us in our best, and manhattans in candlelight. my skirt is belted high at my waist and gives me posture like my great-great-grandmother might have had. we know a tiny bit, but the more we grasp for it, the further fictional it slides.

i drive highway one in a car that isn't ours.
'it's too fucking beautiful,' we yell at the turns where we come upon the treacherous opening up to the water and down. we listen to thrash and radio shows about capsized ships. it takes a boat an hour to sink. we disagree over the part where she drowns or swims to shore. i'm pretty sure she drowns.

also:
-beer in giant glasses on sunday with the golden globes on silent and the bartender with a broken arm.
-'my wife lost her mittens,' you tell the ticket taker. sometimes i like to hear you say, 'my wife,' and stand near you and just hear the phrase in the air, like in the air of the movie theatre. and i am the wife who lost her mittens in the theatre, and i need to go back in now with my husband to find them. and then we will take the train home and we will talk about our day and we will say, 'i had such a nice day with you.'
-plenty of this is hard...looking for jobs and going to job interviews, having jobs, and counting our money. ezra pound sent henry miller a postcard that asked, 'do you ever think about money?' it would be interesting to be a very poor person who never thought about money.
-or you could look at it this way: today is the only thing. it's like all days in that way. each one of them, in their turn, are the absolute only thing.

beginning at 33.

she jumps up toward the christmas lights strung from tree branches to apartment eaves.
there are reasons to like winter. the branches, the lights, the night air like it is spring where we are.

we read our fortunes in a self-help book. we are predators. we have to focus. we should only pick our favorites.
we could recreate the moors. we are in party dresses. band photos. we could do those dance moves. we could only leave places by dancing out the door.

walking in the morning my mind rushes and floods. i want to write. i want to write until i understand or until something feels properly kept. i stop at windows. boots and furs and layers of necklaces and the plastic shoulders of the mannequin. a giant bed in the window. flowers woven through the chain link.

beautiful things and the things i need.

we walk home in the middle of the road. in the morning he wraps his arms around me. we laugh so hard. there isn't that much to clean up. there are cupcakes leftover. my dress is on the gold chair. i sit on the floor and he sits on the couch behind me and teases me. i open the window. i understand our record player, our speakers. i bake and listen to garage rock. he remembers the stories i tell him that i forget. about the man who told me he was jesus, our lord and savior. about the woman on the bus with the corn in the cob in her purse.

at one point i just looked in the mirror, at its frame, and the glass as long as my body.

'you're lucky, laura,' he says. 'you have a good life.'

how she sings and sighs her exclamations, how he says impetuous and brave. the matte mirrors on the road, the tired hipster boys sitting on benches with their skinny legs and coconut water. a photo of her great-grandfather with his name on the wall, and hers. a photo of the white walls of greece. a photo of my grandmother, her trench coat and black high heels.

we sit on the couches in the dark. we crowd. we get close. we play games we disagree over. we talk and talk and talk.

chances to be zen are scattered all over these shining hills. my bike flat. my spider bite. ingredients. walking all the way back. waking up to read the book that is his fictionalized real life sea voyage. fiction and our memories are the same, he says. it's ok. he looks sexy wearing the tiny silver gun below his throat. not fighting the man who sits beside me at the table. sitting on the steps to eat food. kale soaked in vinegar and oil. cabbage. tofu. lemonade with ginger floating in it.

magnetic magnetic magnetic.

a sheet pulled up to project the movie, the purple sky beyond. the storm, how it might look from underneath, from storm-height, and even from above.

evoke and evocative.
sensual is sort of a silly word. but, oh, the senses. wet footprints. and kneecaps on tile. and walking at dusk. and hands on tablecloths. and how our ages feel. our height. gray stockings, or black. knuckles. whatever we feel is permanent. ink and our initials and even our pulses buzzing. the california mornings of our birth. the two little girls that just started living today. their beautiful names, the vowels, the sounds, the a, the y.

there is no way to write until i have properly explained it. that things do grow better and better. seven years ago i was twenty-six. seven years from now i will be forty. when she is my age i will be 66. darkness will descend, the book tells us. everyone flings their heads back and laughs so hard. our ice cubes melt. it is 7pm on a sunday. it isn't that we don't believe it. it's loud, it's early, it's too good and all true.

red jacket with pockets and day planner full of birds and bags of empty champagne bottles.
i have to cry at the kitchen table at midnight because i'm grateful. and i have to cry in the morning because people are actually born. can you imagine? one day they don't exist, and the next day they do. there is a lot in the world: like politics and doom and all of us melting. but there is that too. and my dress zips silver along my ribcage. some nights glow red for reasons we can't explain. and we twist. we make it.

someone you hold when they are three days into this world. that sends you zooming down white hallways. remembering, too, where they can go. we are only incandescent.

'it only brings me joy,' she says.
'me too,' i say.
she jumps with her hand outstretched toward the string of lights.
the gray chiffon of my skirt hits my leg.
our jackets.
the sidewalks where we right ourselves.

it's early and impromptu. we meet. the sentences of her lower arms. our stories. the arrests of our neighborhood. the mason jars glued to the ceiling. the tin lanterns hung in the trees. someone climbed there. blueberries and powdered sugar and slices of avocado and turkish delight wrapped in plastic and salsa described as fire and bulbs of garlic.

there is an anticipation always. what about being thirty-four? what about waiting long enough to ask. what will i get. when will she write me back and say YES. when will i act. what will i remember from this time. what stories will he remind me of. what decisions are being made right this second. polaroid film in silver and flashes of color. everyone else but us is asleep. like the nights we slid through the dark, windows down, shouting off the bridge. we are still that way. and older somehow.

a cake is smashed on the sidewalk. even that seems perfect.

'that is the point at which some other part of my life began,' he says.

the truth is in the center of you.

and it is always getting late.

december (ONE through SIX)

do you anticipate sentiment and poetry and reverie?

do you expect passion and stimulus and melodrama?

-charlotte brontë

ONE: home. west coast.

he leaves for the airport early in the morning.

before we fall asleep he says, 'do you believe in ghosts?'

i hear a clang on our fire escape that i know are the little metal hands of a ghost.
i think of the little boy who lived inside the electricity of my previous home.
i think of the devil i saw in the barn on the hill as a child.
i think of the expensive house on the cliff-edge with the ominous corners. we heard the ocean all night long.

these are some of the important haunted stories of my life. yet in many ways i've never had to question anything.

'yes,' i say, 'i think so.'

but when i think of the people i know who have died they are, in fact, very far away. back when i practiced being a smoker for a week in my early twenties, j. shared his cigarettes with me. we sat close in the cab and on the stairs of the subway. he helped me with my jacket like men do in the movies. when he died he was far older than me and now he is far younger. he said he'd kiss me when he knew me better, but we never knew each other better.

i don't mean him when i think of ghosts. though maybe on the night in the country when i was sewing a hot pink button back onto a hot pink coat and we talked about him in the few weeks closest to his death. when i think of him it is dark blue. it is that night walking. it is his dark hair.

i don't mean a., who i can only picture petulant, hand on hip, beautiful, teaching me dance moves. teaching me self-defense.

i don't mean anyone i've known who was alive once.

'who do you mean then?' he asks.

i think of the 1800s and murder. i don't know who i mean. like so many things, these stories are for the living people.

on the airplane when they bring the oxygen tank for her, i start to cry. her fear bothers me more than my own. i watch the kardashians. and that's weird too. her child sits wide-eyed between his parents. later, he has fallen asleep. i wonder if he will remember this when he is an adult.

at what age is the first time you question heaven. i forget.

the only quality of time is actually timelessness. the slow turn of the ceiling fans in the sun-warmed wooden ceiling. the december corner of mission and 20th that is so beautiful i just have to take a picture of the sky even though i know it won't translate. the plywood painted gunmetal. i need to think that it is beautiful enough to keep. and try.

or his road trips with girls on highways i've not traveled. i can conjure the palettes of them. pure blues blasted with sun. the right details for the time. the muted hues. the confusing life of a spy.

or the photos of my father when he was 16 that i've never seen before. the photos of me i've never seen before. maybe eight years old. hula-hooping on the brick patio in bare feet. that's the thing i was trying to describe all this time. what that felt like. literally bare feet on brick. i guess i wasn't wondering about what happened after we die.

in order to fall asleep i must press my feet between his ankles. this is a habit from before we lived in separate cities for a time. i wrote him a letter on wrapping paper and folded it into his pocket. his wedding ring came in the mail today, on the last day of the year with its burnished silver and secret diamonds. i found that letter recently and it said, the brightest routes.

in order to fall asleep i must turn to my back and put one hand on my heart and the other on my stomach and contemplate...i don't know, everything, i guess. that first slow spark of sleep. my dreams are layers and layers and layers.

the smashed screen of an iPhone. him, a lot. wandering the most incredible architecture, both of buildings and of water. being in the future. episodic things that make perfect and complicated sense.

eight vignettes of a marriage. biting. risotto. sake. the bookstore. tequila bar. the dress that won't let us get out the door. parties on roofs and stairwells that are cement like college and strung with lights like college too and lingered at too late.

TWO: home. east coast.

immediately i don't want to wear my own clothes. i want to wear the soft gray t-shirts i find in my mom's closet, my grandmother's burgundy socks. i want to wear black dresses i find hanging in the shed at the dump, i want to wear izod sweaters a shade of green i would never choose, and 1970's leather over mini-dress nightgowns. i want costume jewelry to laden fingers and wrists and neck. i want to buy new underwear, red lace and black shimmer. i want to not wash my hair and wear red lipstick and listen to haunting music on repeat and photograph myself in fuchsia on tree stumps and in yellow party dresses in the dried grass by the empty wintertime pool. i want to search bookshelves for what i wrote when i was seventeen. sift through antique necklaces. tables piled with mink and lamps and nathanial hawthorne and lace and boxes of nails and juice glasses with the pale red outlines of vintage cartoon characters. i guess i want to find things. but also something else.

to be antique something must be 100 years old.

you can hear the other worlds best at 3am. the ones you hope are there. the ones that must be.

you can seek and leave some of the mystery.

if you are awakened every morning at 4am you have missed it by an hour. but still the fog outside the window might be this odd sort of red, and you might take a moment to hear the echoes of sleep falling away, the dreams lingering to see if you will be returning to them.

i think about:

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

(i can't say).

the fire fills up the cabin with heat.

one thing i wrote when i was seventeen: he is thunder. i am lightning. i count the seconds in between.

then the global warming warmed up magic hour fills dusk with this perfect light and air.

i fling my feet out from the blankets.

i open the windows.

catherine and heathcliff are wandering the moors. it's getting so good and juicy.

they are promising to haunt each other. promising to fling themselves on the grave of the other.

also, the boys of the wire are getting sneaky.

it rains.

THREE: the city.

i miss having a roof. i have gotten good at this cinematic thing i can do. this secret heart and secret cinema. in the moments where reality leaves off, i can see moments (hours) beyond.

it is how things feel, for one. but also how they look. and how i imagine them. often the world is impossibly beautiful, thick with colors, with things happening.

lush. tilting toward intimacy. shoes taken off.

a little less afraid. but it's hard to say if more or less is at stake.

it is easy to forget ourselves when there is so much to be.

cul-de-sac.

it's 2am and i'm...

FOUR: the country.

so, say i get the dress that someone left hanging there. it has a low-cut back in a v-shape, and small black cloth covered buttons that trail up it. it has a long slit up the thigh and a silk sash around the waist.

i am going to wear this. i wore it on the last night of last year. and i will wear it on some nights in this year when i will be 33 years old. i wore it on the roof and looked out and no one else was there.

i dream i have 1,000 dresses. you can see me in them, right? it is why i am taking the time to describe the best one. this is important.

FIVE: the suburbs.

i am diesel trucks and beaded pearled vintage capes and mantras and 4pm wine and fireplaces and the wind outside.

our private lives. the day-to-day. the up-close. who knows? we all might punch each other in the side of the head. tell love stories. admissions (make them). bite each other's fingers. knock things out of our hands to kiss better in our kitchens. buy the latest translations with blue lace across the cover. but then you can zoom out too and wonder wonder wonder.

wonder at childhood and 30 year marriages and adultery and happiness and the sense of smell or sound. wonder at time and ghosts and landscapes. i joke, but i'm serious too. i'm serious, but i'm joking. the temperature and the fetish. how something might shatter. how you might walk the u-shapes to the spy bridge in the dark, to where the diamonds were left, the secrets sold. there is no way to predict. you can only do your best. have your reasons.

what is essential. what is excess. what is too much to ask. i consider how my diary will be misinterpreted in later centuries. the footnotes no one will flip to. the language that will be outdated. the initials that no one will be able to place.

SIX: new year's resolutions.

now might be the time to talk about resolutions, a thing i like to do (both the making and the talking of them). i think the ritual is important, even for those unkept ones. maybe especially for them.

my grandmother said to travel a lot and take many lovers.

driving 211 often at sunset. you never get any older except in relation to other people, other times of your life. houses that inch closer and closer to the river. each year older i feel differently about getting older. this year i feel that so much is constantly in states of beginning, that so much is exactly as i'd always hoped it would be.

at the restaurant where it was too early for anyone else to be there i imagined i was a victorian woman running away, when it was hard for women to do those sorts of things, when they had to tear through the orchard at night in the rain and catch a cold that killed them and that sort of thing. the male waiters hovered and flitted about and called me, 'ma'm...' and i tipped them a lot and went off back into the night.

imagine piling your kids in the car and taking off. imagine the future as it prepares itself for you, and you predicting it, unwitting, impossible.

for now it is sunset, this hot pink splatter everywhere. it is his hands, his beautiful eyes, the two of us.

two days in, resolve is natural and easy.

no one really knows anything.

i dream i meet his family.

then, that we have a baby.

that i know how to hold her and care for her and that this makes him love me.

we are also trying to escape.

someone jumps from an impossible height.

we are on a ship.

we are in a hospital.

where was i last night?

it is the future again, everything metallic and foreboding.

it means what you want it to mean. fantasy and compensation.

OK, but back to resolutions:

here is what i promise.

what will be more. less.

the attention i will pay. the care i will take. the work i will do.

there are these towns with quiet roads.

there are all these different cities.

there are stretches of suburb with ordinances for beige.

there are rivers with names. hazel. rush.

there is a map that tells us how many thousands of feet we might plummet.

but again it turns out we don't.

there is analogue and sex and neural pathways.

i want him to be happy, but i also to think of me, which is something different from a happiness, though not its opposite. that's not a resolution exactly. looking at less screens. spending more time with my heart over my head. no facebook in the morning while my brain is its softest and most creative, that sort of thing.

i think i might be an urbanite forever. i unpack, piling all my clothes on the floor. thrift store dresses with hot pink flowers or gray stripes. we meet for brunch. we laugh so hard my hands go numb. we stand outside in the half-rain saying goodbye for a long time, making plans, talking about our days. we are glad to be together again. later we will text about our week, what parts of it are free. we will get dressed up and go out. we will stay in.

these days are our life. and the end of our year.

courting a car crash.

Part One. Before.

coming upon it was like a dream. the body glistening black like it was wet almost. the accident had happened hours before. the wheels were not spinning, though i remember them that way. the car was upside down in the middle of the road. whatever had happened already having happened a long time ago. and us, coming from somewhere. i take the alley to not see. it's more than quiet. the inside of things usually glows blue. other people's homes at night glow blue. people are kind, let you pass. people speed. i guess it happens for all reasons: fault and chance alike.

anywhere can be a performance. a place with white walls or off-white walls. a place where bloodied shirts crumple where they are thrown. a place where people take their clothes off. a woman wrapped in cloth is walking the hill. i am not new to driving but i don't do it often. i prefer back roads or long stretches of highway. at the top of the peak we can see clearly for miles, the swell of traffic off the bridge, even the cities across the bay wavering gold there. it's incredible to be alive. girls in a limo screech and howl into the night. they are saying the same thing i think. i can put myself right behind where he is standing and he keeps me warm and i turn my head to rest on the back of his neck, and across his shoulders. and i breathe in and i just think, thank you for this second. holy shit, thank you.

in 1977 my grandfather wrote: each day is like a portrait of my whole entire life in miniature.

people are either getting better or getting worse. going out of my way just the smallest bit is so strange. the other side of the street. an earlier part of the day. lemonade with cayenne piled at the bottom. just a little bit of a highly addictive thing. these pleasures of ours can be turned inside out. satellite images of a city i hardly know at all. even constants like south or north are arbitrary. the underneath part of highways. the yards and cement of the rough parts of town. walking the wrong direction toward the beautiful water. i use the bridge to orient myself. i pretend i don't see him looking back at me.

anomie.
or the smoke and holy water of a blessed place.
the sound of my shoes on church-floor.
i like the idea of kneeling.
of sacredness.
of walking out into the cold to hear his voice, my arms bare.
of her photo, pale yellow. and the mystery of each person behind the camera too.

the simplicity of it: his hand on the run in my stockings. or in my hair.
the simplicity of it: we are born and we will die.
i think i didn't really believe it was truly possible. but she is gone from this earth.

Part Two. After.

riding backwards on the train, the one i think my dad hopped illegally back when it was possible to do such things. the childhood homes of my parents swelling with additions and modern roofs, cleaned of ivy. we sneak away to drink irish whiskey. the street is narrow. along the sides of it are dark branches wrapped with white lights. i am surprised both by what i remember and what i forget. it is when we are sleeping that our brains decide what is important. laying the penny on the track. being early. clues, i guess. artifacts. what part of me can i turn toward what part of you? what choreography of closeness.

i write letters on the plane and then give them to the flight attendants. i love people's initials. i love foreshadowing. far below me the lights of the earth are scattered out in pin-pricks. for the first time i feel like i believe in flight. i learned that a city can build and dismantle itself all in one day. the lines of life can soften and embolden simultaneously. your hands can grow weak. light, gold, turquoise, a warm pink, chain link, the opaque of factory smoke against the sky over the highway. purple glass.

do what you want with your life, she says. the man beside me on the plane is doing algebra problems for six hours. there is something quite beautiful about algebra problems if you aren't trying to solve them. for 48 hours after she says that i just think...yesyesyesyesyesyes. i will.

i don't ever want to feel finished.

i am in a wine cellar.
a cemetery.
a catholic church.
a subway.
a bar with the heat turned high and football on. and no music.
an airport.
a mexican restaurant with christmas lights in the window.
a road outside the city.
back inside my own tiny and perfect home.
"this doesn't look like oakland," i say. i feel dreamy and strange.
"it's san francisco," he tells me. "you live here."
i fall into my life.
it has rained and the streets are damp.
there are pale purple flowers on the table in my favorite vase that once i thought i'd lost and i lay on the kitchen floor until i remembered where it was.
a margarita stirred and the edges of the glass laced with salt.
a half-gesture they call it, when you reach your palm up toward someone. it means they are meant to take it, press theirs down on top. and he does.

i fell asleep every night in that strange bed with my phone breathing beside me. the pale chandeliers floated underneath me. we stole wine. we walked through the cold. we sat at the feet of the virgin mary in the grotto. we all share blood and belong to each other.
and her spirit is in us.

the thing about every single second is that you can feel each one. each step evocative. even hurtling through the air, feverish, anxious, mourning, besotted, disoriented, unsure. you can. they pass and pass and pass, but you can feel them.