July 25th, 2014

I should have just written last night, after midnight, about Catherine our beautiful neighbor
who was walking her dog, and how we, Brett and Davia and I, were all on the porch,
Davia and I just having finished a walk and Brett coming out from his room to smoke
a cigarette. I love your garden. I said to Catherine It kept me alive, the beauty of it, the 
wildness of it when everything else had died when I first moved here. I watched it sway 
from my second floor window and knew that all would be well someday. She smiles and says  
I am so glad. That garden got me through the three years after my divorce. I went to bed
after that with dreams of her, her lovely face and calm smile and how she was so exactly
the kind of woman I want eventually to be. But now it is 2:30 in the morning and I am lying
here, wrung out, half asleep, unable to articulate the night. It was saturated with beautiful men,
none of whom I wanted, and there was something about what the Russian boy said about
American women that made me feel certain that I was not meant for the heart of an American
man, nor the heart of a Russian boy. The categorical response, the sifting and separating -
I am a wildflower without a garden; I am a bird and there is nowhere to land.