6.16

I am the sounds of heavy rain. I breathe in the spaces between drops, a thin silence amid the hammering. My voice is the hiss of droplets disintegrating. I move like the gurgle in a rivulet, a dance that changes without being different. I spatter. Why cover your head? Why rush indoors? I'm here, waiting for you in the downpour.

6.15

Just imagine, if you will, that you had said exactly what your enemy just said, but replace your group with theirs. Imagine they've just thrown back your words, patched and replaced. What if every good argument was suddenly two-sided?
We wouldn't have science, or weather reports, or political discourse, or love. All that would die, and so would we. Humans can't function without an enemy, it seems.

6.12

The girls at the Sunglass Hut are cleaning up and fighting about which music to play next. We only got about half of I'm in Love With a Stripper before they changed it again. After so long with just their music and the occasional patron in a wheelchair being pushed to their gate, a hundred fifty people just swept by, and a hundred fifty more are behind them. The man in the duty-free sneezed on his hands and went back to work. My flight doesn't leave for another half hour.

6.11

"I'm not ready to leave the house." I can feel the ache of the loss of home already.
"Then, go without thinking about it. Like a band-aid."
"Easy for you to say." It's you I'll be missing while I'm away.

6.10

Slip-strike from silver eyes, a glancing blow of unfortunate timing, a blood-letting slash of slavish lust lining my foul flesh. Wherefore: I cannot love, I am incapable. Why, then, should this shivering stuff of mortal bones be so indecently my own? I reject it, part and parcel, and sent it so discovered back to its source, a clanging cymbal, or a a a a banging drum.

6.8

Do you know that particular scream in your lungs, the tight feeling of cold fingers pulling hard on your throat, the ugly panting noise bleeding through the weak wisp of wind around your ears, the angry spikes of pain your heart makes behind your ribs, truly caged in this time, unable to escape but tunneling and tearing and desperately dying to end the seemingly endless agony? I can feel my knees exploding and crying, failing and dying, yet I push on, ignoring them. There is no slavering beast behind me, no reward ahead. I press on.
Exercise.

6.7

My butt feels a thumping pain. I shift again, this time to my side. The seat I'm on is uncomfortable after six hours not moving. I blink, conscious of the stupidity of this decision I've made. Why am I still here? I close my eyes, and the heat of the small room suffocates me. There's no breeze. There's no noise. There's no comfort. I listen to the soft slowness of my own breathing for a minute, and the almost imperceptible sounds of the cloth shifting beneath me.
Suddenly, I'm up. The space I'm in is impossible to pace, too small for stretching out. I walk to the only door and push it open. The bug sounds assault me. The sunlight scorches. The feeling of dread grass on my feet overwhelms.

Why did I spend so long in a prison of my own design?

6.4

The shallow sun strikes hard against the far side of the plateau. I can see its faint ombre dusting the treetops of the near side, but all that's left of the day is an outline and a glow around the highest tips of the trees. The air feels full, and the light spills out of it. I sigh.
"Summer's here."

6.3b

If I say she haunts me, you'll forgive my anachronism; I know she isn't dead. But she does haunt. It's the correct word. She has entirely disappeared into the bleak expanse of death, and her ghost only lives with me. She has cast a pall on my mind that is not reflected in the world around me. She has left no material mark on the world I can see, no look-alikes, no doubles, no mental or emotional döppelgangers.
If it weren't for the ring she left on the bedside table, I could have dreamed her—a nightmare that won't fade on waking.

I want to kill what's left of her, climbing to the inside crevices of my beleaguered skull, but they don't make a knife that will exterminate the spirit and leave the flesh intact, or I would be scraping her out already.

6.3

She was certainly far from perfect, I know that. She wasn't an excellent person, but she was my favorite person, and I loved her. I wonder if that's why she invades all my dreams?

6.2

I pay lip service to a dead goddess. I die, I kill myself to fit in with her in her spaces. I carry her corpse with me. The petitions I sing to her build failure on failure until the continuous paean of my words bounce again from her narrow rib bones. I live so she'll hear me, but I know she can't.

6.1

The bar is very low.
I've had two students remark that I was, on balance, their favorite substitute ever. One teacher told another that I kept the class in stitches. A math teacher said, quite earnestly, that I was marvelous at keeping a student "engaged."
I will admit only that I have managed to exactly perform according to expectations. The bar is very low.