February 18th, 2014

 And in the summer the family was always driving back from the beach after dark, your father
singing in his bold and tuneless voice to the oldies station. Twenty years later you would tell this
to a man on the street just before midnight after he had followed you out of a bar and grabbed
your arm. Let me be your friend he kept saying, relentless like waves. You struggled away from his hands and finally said no! I don't want a friend it is late I have no more room in my life for the 
voices of men. My father sang to all the songs were played in the bar tonight, and all I want is solitude and you fell, crying into this stranger’s arms, resistant and angry, and he held you, and
even touched your hair in an effort to close an invisible wound, honey honey he said, and you
hated him even more for it. This man was between the age of a lover and a father and as you
walked away your steps quickened to a run and he stood looking after you like a confused animal. Tonight you are mending your lungs by lying very still in bed and there is a dizziness that comes
with the stillness and you look out the window and trick yourself into thinking the reflection of
the ceiling light is the full moon until, yes, the ceiling light is not on, and yes, it is the full moon,
and how naked, how small, how unbegun you feel, lying very still in the view of the moon.


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A new world has opened itself to you. There are swinging doors everywhere. This is not an awakening, you are already awake. In fact you can't sleep, in spite of the bronchitis, in spite of the codeine; there are too many trembling violin strings that you must hear, too many angles of the room to consider. It occurs to you when you look in the mirror that your face is swollen with words you haven't said yet and that your eyes are swollen with things you haven't seen yet and the thinness of your skin, its translucent pale, only confirms all of this as you can see ideas you haven't thought yet swimming below your surface. It's like a burning just beneath my skin you said to the PA today at the walk-in clinic. There is a softness to the edges of things, and while this is not wholly unpleasant, I don't feel quite right either. She nods loudly but she doesn't understand. She writes you out of work for the remainder of the week anyway and after some deliberation, you accept. When you walked to the college yesterday you passed an electric crosswalk sign knocked over into a snow bank. The orange hand was lit, and you wanted to hold it with an unmatched tenderness. What is next? You whisper to the heating coils in your room which are whispering back to you in a language you don't know. You think there is something constant about the sound though. It is an old language, like wind.