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.