2.26

Mutability

Kev stepped nearly into the steady stream of cars to flag a cab, leaning farther and farther to see and be seen. He couldn't see but rather felt her presence behind him, huddled in the heavy coat she liked to wear, waiting just out of the spray of rain and expletives pelting him as car after car rushed past. Finally, a cab pulled up and just as quickly pulled away, but this time with her inside. Kev blinked. Had she kissed him goodbye?

2.25

I remember when I decided to see a counselor. I had just gotten home from work at MMS, twenty five miles to drive in the cold of a January afternoon. I was trying to unlock the door to get inside. The dog was dancing near me, excited to go inside, and I was trying to manage my bag and the key for the lock at the same time. I just started crying. I remember the wall imposing on me, the dead leaves underfoot, the gray sky, the open screen door pushing insistently against my shoulder, the keys in my hand. I felt so small, so useless, so alone. I knew there were people who would listen if I wanted to talk about what I was going through. But I wanted someone who could maybe give me answers, who was trained to see the inside of skulls and to lay out what to do next.
I called an office that couldn't take me that day. It had been months since she had left for the last time, and longer since she had left without knowing she was leaving for good. I called around to a few other offices until I found a man who could see me after work. I scheduled an appointment. I felt awful.
On my first visit, I laid out everything that had happened, all the things I could see that led up to the end of the end, and he sighed and suggested that she was cheating on me, that she didn't love me anymore, that I should get a divorce. I knew as soon as he said it that if my insurance didn't pay for counseling I would never go back. He had never seen anyone like me before, and I don't know why. People like me exist. I've met them. But I think perhaps people like me don't often end up in counseling sessions in Moberly, Missouri. I think perhaps ninety percent of the breakups he sees are due to abuse or infidelity.
I made a string of appointments, at first once a week, then every other, then he let me go. Maybe he thought I was better, or that I was beyond his treatment. Either way, I wish I could have gone to a psychologist, not to be diagnosed but to be explained. I wish I could have talked to myself from today. I wish I hadn't been hitched by necessity to the only counselor available, a man who thought the only right answer was something I still don't think was likely. Who knows? Maybe she cheated on me. But hearing it didn't make my life better.

I remember playing the saddest songs I knew for an hour in an old chair outside in the moonlight, the dog circling nervously at my feet, until my fingers were so ice-cold I couldn't form chords anymore and I just softly sang a song I used to love, the song I held for her. I got up from the chair and took the dog inside and slept on his bed even though he's terrible at being comforting because he likes to stand up and walk on you when he gets confused, which is all the time.

I remember the last time I saw her. She was like a balloon that had been sitting for too long in the corner, tired and used up. She was probably just off a hard shift. She was, all things considered, pointless to me, and all the tears I had ever shed over her seemed wasted in that moment. I had taken off my ring to see her, to sign the divorce papers that day. I didn't wear it after that. I didn't need to be honest to my bond with her anymore because you can't be married to a deflated balloon.

I have lived a good life and had a bad marriage. I'll carry my scars forever, but they don't always have to hurt. And the next time I see a counselor who gives bad advice, or sing in an ice cold night, or take off a ring, it won't be for her.

2.24

[It's 11:11, make a wish! I meant to post a music response today, sorry Stephen. I watched like ten videos of songs from new and old artists and I didn't get around to Big Sean haha I'm the worst]

Corrugated tin roofs
Make thunder of their own when
Liquid-bearing black skies
Open up to send down
A sheet of water too thick
For corrugated tin roofs

~Shantytown~

2.23

Stanley slowly scrolled down through the countless posts on his Facebook feed, not really looking anymore. He was just trying to pass a moment while he waited for the barista to hand him the black coffee he had ordered. Just as he was about to close his phone, he saw a sad post: his old college roommate had passed away. Assumably, the man's son had found some way to log in, just to let people know. Suddenly, the tables were quite turned around. Stanley didn't hear the woman calling his name, holding out the small cup of pointless hot liquid. Stanley felt very old. She set the cup down and went back to making some large latte for the next order. Stanley pulled up his messaging application and wrote a text to his favorite nephew.
"Byron I know this is strange but if you ever need to get into my facebook account.....if I'm in the hospital or the like......."
He put the phone back in his pocket without hitting send. Maybe a letter would do. He picked up his coffee, dropped a dollar in the tip jar, and walked back to work, just a half a block or so.

2.22

[I suppose I should clarify sometimes when things are fictional and I write in first person. Well, here it is.]

Mom sent me into town today to pick up a used camera for Dad's birthday. She found it on Craigslist and has been texting the woman all day about the price and the meeting. Because she works weekends and I don't, I got corralled into doing her a favor. I have four hundred dollars in an envelope and I'm driving to town.
The restaurant for the meeting is in a place I never really go. Let's be honest, I never really go into town anyway, but this breakfast joint is on the far side of nowhere, so I guess I'll have to suck it up. I walk in the door, and I guess I'm supposed to be looking for a woman in red scrubs. I guess a doctor, a nurse? Someone just off the graveyard shift? The hospital is just over the ridge. There's no one wearing red, so I just take a seat. The waitress looks confused at me when I wave her off. I'm already five minutes late and I don't need any reason to stay here if the woman shows up with the camera.
Through the glass door, I see a large truck pull up and a red shape jump out. I catch myself halfway through a deep sigh of relief as I stand up, envelope in hand.
She swings the door wide and scans the room and I've already made a mistake. Her eyes catch on me and, well, she was always fast. She figures it out. I know she does, because she's already back out the door.
I sort of hop-skip around tables to catch up with her, but she's already got her keys out to get into her truck by the time I scuff-scrape a stop at her bumper. The vast expanse of the hood lies between us, and she's so small I can barely see her above the shoulder.
"Georgia was your mother. I should have known."
"You're going by your middle name?"
"Well, it's easier, I guess, on the Internet." She stops with keys in hand. "Why the hell would you--" but she cuts herself off. I guess she didn't need the answer, after all.
"I'm just here to buy the camera."
"Oh, right." She looks mad as ever, like I just left the door open when I went to take out the trash. "You can just have it--" she says, flipping the strap over her shoulder "--if you promise to just leave me alone, okay?" The camera bag comes flying up over the hood and lands with a hollow metallic thunder. I don't even move.
"That's not what you agreed to. You should at least take the money."
"I don't want your money. I don't want--just go."
I reached up, slowly, and took the bag off the hood. The truck was still between us, and I couldn't read her body language seeing only her face. I was starting to sweat, but it wasn't that hot in the sun. I was just nervous. "You deleted my mother's phone number?"
"What?"
"You didn't know Georgia was my mother. You deleted my mother's number from your phone."
"Terrence--" her hand to her temples, eyes scrunched shut--
"I'll go. I just wish we could talk once like adults."
She rolled her eyes like when I used to tell a terrible joke, and then I'd lean in for the punchline she already knew and I would punctuate it with a smile and she would smile because she couldn't help it and that was just what things were, no changin' them, and yet. The door to this big new truck was open and she threw herself inside. She honked twice before backing up and I felt the memory rip me as she honked twice, just like always, and she left me there in her town holding her camera that used to be full up of my pictures of my life. I wonder if the photovoltaic cells remember the shape of her face. I wonder if there were so many pictures of her on the sensor that it's aged into a phantasmal memory of her, if every cell is charged up with a specter, if every picture it will ever take will still have traces of her in the wear patterns of the electronics, if every photograph for the rest of its life will contain a ghost of her.

2.21

Marc knew roughly when he was going to die. It was about four years ago when he first visited the seer with his friends, as a lark, for Justin's stag party. Some idiot groomsman or other had seen her advertisement in the paper and thought it would be hilarious. So all five of them piled into Deshaun's old Tercel and flew through town with the windows down and the radio blasting. They pulled up to a strip mall and saw a strange-looking young woman waiting in the doorway of the Psychic Portal and Tarot. She watched silently as they pulled up and stopped the car, the sudden radio stop a snapping rubber band. Her eyes were too wide to be conventionally attractive, but she held herself with such confidence that Marc felt, with a twinge, her similarity to his last love. She made eye contact with every man in the small car and then turned on her heel and disappeared into the store.

Justin burst into laughter. "You guys brought me to a hot mystic?" The guys all hooted and slapped him and pushed him out of the car and into the building, but Marc hung back. There had been something, maybe too much, in her gaze. He stood in the doorway, which was propped open to let in a breeze. The interior of the shop was a single large room with a circle of five cushions and, at the far side, a single door. The walls were hung with patterned cloth and strange diagrams of chi pathways. There was a strong, sharp aromatic burning in some hidden pot, filling the room with an oily haze. Marc didn't leave the doorway as the other men sat down, slowly coming to quiet.

The far door opened, and Marc felt his heart beating faster. He didn't believe in this nonsense, anyway. The young woman appeared, this time with a nearly-spherical bowl full of water. She walked slowly to the circle, but paused as Deshaun hissed "Marc! Come on, man."

"That seat is not his," she said softly.

"Sorry, what?" Carlo cleared his throat.
She sat down and placed the bowl between her legs. Marc watched from near the doorway as she performed some impressive slight of hand tricks, thrusting her hands deep into the bowl of water and flicking out tarot cards at the best man and the groom. By the time Justin had five or six copies of the lovers, the woman had earned her money and the group was in stitches. Benjamin paid her in cash and they all left, slapping each other on the back. But Marc hung back. She was staring directly at him. She was very small, suddenly, in the big empty room, but Marc was held. He started to feel his breathing quite consciously.
"Come here," she said, standing, holding out a small piece of paper. He drew near to her rock-steady, outstretched arm, and took the small scrap. It looked like it had been folded over several times and torn from a well-made journal. As he went to unfold it, she fled to the back room and slapped the door closed behind her. In the dim lighting, he could barely make out the words.

I saw you this morning and knew a date: don't make plans for July.

He rubbed his eyes and looked at the paper again, but there was no mistaking the writing there. What did it mean? Could it mean anything else? He stumbled out of the Psychic Portal and into the old Tercel, still clutching the paper. No one saw him draw it out multiple times to stare at it, because they were all yelling "Born in the USA" into the early summer sunshine. He had less than two months.

Marc sat down that evening and made a list of the things he would like to do. He called his childhood friend first and patched things up between them. He ordered his mother the only original vinyl pressing of Styx' discography that she was missing. He wrote a short note to his little sister that closed out all the secrets he had ever kept from her and dropped it in the mail. He threw away a box of embarrassing memorabilia from his last two relationships.
Marc finished law school that May. He didn't apply to any internships, which puzzled his friends and worried his mother, but they assumed he was taking a break year. He planned a trip to Guadalcanal to see where his grandfather had been killed in the war, and he spent two weeks just wandering with a group of reckless friends he had made while snorkeling in New Guinea. He came back in June and sat around the house for four days cleaning out his room, throwing away all the useless detritus from his school days and carefully organizing all the things he thought his mother might like to see. He sat down and wrote a will on the thirtieth of June, wrote his mother a note explaining everything, and fell asleep to die.

When he woke up the next morning, he was utterly confused. He whipped the covers nearly across the room and fell to his hands and knees in his haste. He tipped the bookcase over trying to pull his journal off the shelf, and by the time he had the hastily scratched note from the seer in his hands, his roommate was pounding on the door, asking about the noise.
"It's nothing!" Marc shouted. "I just had to go to the bathroom, and, uh--I tripped putting on pants."
"You sleep in the buff?" came the incredulous reply.
Marc didn't respond. He was trying to understand, and then it dawned on him. She must have meant next July. Or maybe the one after that. She wasn't specific. Marc smiled a little, totally relieved, and called his uncle about the part-time job he'd been bugging him about.

The next June, he was in the Philippines. The June after that he saw Machu Picchu. The June after that, Caracas. His family could not explain why he always seemed to return in the last week of June, covered in new joy and armed with presents, only to sit in the family home for four or five days, seemingly immobile.

He never went back to the Psychic Portal, and besides, it was closed soon afterward. There isn't much money in magic and charlatanism, and the location was bad, anyhow.

2.20

[I have a much larger story I'm working on, so this will have to do.]

Have you ever fallen in love with an empty place made for humans? Have you watched a lonesome basketball drift across an empty lot set up as a community basketball court? Have you looked up from your book in the library and found that there were no humans and no noise? Have you broken into an empty fairground just to wander through the building where the best pigs in the state will be shown in a short five months?
And if you could fall in love in an empty place made for humans, you would no longer be alone, and the emptiness would be sweeter because then the place is made for you, and the basketball court is yours without free throws and the library is yours without books and the fair is yours without summer, and every moment is a private eternity. And you could never go back to the time when things were empty and you're too happy for words.

2.17

You kissed me first, today. The yawning miles could convince me otherwise, but the taste of it was on my lips. I've been trying to return the favor, but I don't know: can you feel me there?

2.15

I'm in a hammock tonight. I set it up in the sun and it was the perfect temperature for a snooze. Now, ten hours and thirty degrees later, I'm attempting to measure how quickly I'll freeze to death. I'm wearing thermal underwear, chunky wool socks, a medium-weight shirt, a light jacket, and a smile. Perhaps I'll shiver until I give up and go back inside, but then I'll know. Perhaps I'll find a happy equilibrium between frigid and cocooned. Either way, I'm one step closer to an adventure.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.26

Me Versus Me
Stacy Barthe

I've been feeling disconnected /from/
The smooth-smelling touch /of/
Another human being /against/
My wounded heart /for/
Too long.

Which futures can you see /into/
Because all I want is to run /toward/
The one where I am /inside/
Your house /between/
safe walls.

Lyrics
It's difficult to read these lyrics and talk about my past, but for once it's not because the past is sad. It's because my present feels more alive in this song than my past.

I suppose this problem of getting in the way of yourself, of not allowing the true you to be happy because the mind you has told lies, painted so convincingly they adopt the pose and identity of reality, this problem is not new to this song or me, but I can attempt to outline my first meeting with it. Because, really, hasn't everyone lived this story once?
In high school, I first realized what everyone else had been selling as normal humanity for all those years. I found living in me new wants that expressed themselves (as I know it now) so innocently and so passionately that I felt they must be wrong. (And how is that right? I suppose I equated the desire for things with the indulgence in them, and indulgence itself with overindulgence. In the same way that the thought of eggs or bagels or pancakes push themselves on your growling mind as you rub the sleep from your eyes in the morning, and you chide yourself for not wanting an apple and toast [even though the wanting of pancakes is not the same as pushing five into your mouth], I felt the incessant nag that something really truly must be wrong about wanting something you don't quite know how to deserve, even.) I remember the physical shock of her knee touching mine beneath the table in math class. Honestly, they just brushed, but I jerked away in shock at being made to feel something so strongly, and I sat, motionless and staring at my paper for what would have been an uncomfortably long time if she had actually looked at me, which she didn't, because the thought didn't occur to her to do so. I wasn't in her head, but she was in mine. I liked the first person I ever liked because she was frank and happy, and it wasn't until after I asked her out and she told me no that I found out how much she had hidden of her sorrow. I didn't get to know her, and I certainly didn't make any moves to do so because I held a deep-set fact so close to my bones that they were imprinted with it: I wasn't desirable. Why would she want anything as awkward as this? My future was written on my skeleton from the moment I woke up to sexual desire: I was unwantable because I didn't know I could be.
You can run as fast as you can, but you can't outrun yourself.

Stephen
You make me want to listen to the whole album. We were talking about this just today. Why don't people listen to albums anymore? I guess it's the fractured way in which music is now available. In order to get to track three, you don't need to put the needle in the middle of track two's third verse on accident.
I think, if this song came from body image issues and a fear of never being touched, that it does a better job of communicating humanity than Meghan Trainor's Bass. That's okay. I also think that I understand the message from a personal perspective. I shouldn't, but I don't feel attractive. Even at my most confident, I cannot remove that doubt.

2.13

Possible futures include, but are not limited to: every human occupies a small piece of a continuous tape backup of humanity's collective neural load after a particularly disastrous Denny's menu "innovation" causes a collective and involuntary addiction crisis that terminates all life, or possibly the continuing globalization and intermarriage trend results in a seventeen billion-person population of individuals, all named Greg, and all genetically identical, leading to a total population collapse, or, I guess, the invention of sentient wheat and rice allows for exponential yields of the world's favorite cereal crops and an ethical quandary that divides humanity so extensively that an enormous world war erupts concluding with a morally bankrupt vegan victor class that eschews traditional eating entirely in favor of ingesting powdered mineral extracts and hot recycling. I don't know what will happen, I'm not Nostradamus. But these seem pretty likely to me.

2.12

[Just leaving this here for you. It's probably my favorite post I never put on the sidebar with my favorites.]

I kept pieces of you for so long because I didn't know what else to do. You don't want these back. I've curled myself up into a rapidly spinning problem. I'm staring at your things in these dissipated piles, a cloud-sort of mess, and I'm not crying. You don't deserve to be thrown away, but I can't keep you anymore. Does anyone want an old printer? It has someone else's fingerprints on it, if that's too much. It's too much for me.

2.11

Dirk sulked from the room, nursing a cut heart. She had been passion, been fire, just yesterday. He didn't (or couldn't) understand what had changed. Once, the back of his hand had been enough to make her gasp and writhe, and now his sweetest words were handed back to him, dissected and poisoned. He slapped a broad palm against the deep mahogany doorframe and let his broad shoulders pull in with envy as her laugh tinkled out across the wide hall behind him. In his favorite dress, at his favorite opera, and surrounded by a cloud of men. Dirk couldn't think of a worse universe to live in.

2.10

Fortinbras lives.
You know how, sometimes, a thing you said comes back to you time and time again, almost memetic in its urgency and frequency, and it becomes a permanent fixture in your life, drawing itself up unbidden from the depths of your mind when you have no call nor need for it?
Ice be liquor, cold er and wine.
Nelly's Rest-u-raunt (ooohwoww)
Why are there so many on one?
Ruth Bader-Ginsburg.
Kudzu: the vine that ate the South.
Mitochondria: the powerhouse of the cell.
Fortinbras is my newest. Fortinbras lives.

2.9

Prostrated on the floor, Dorian dared not peek at the royalty assembling around him, deliberating on his fate.
"He has penetrated the royal antechamber, Mother."
"At least. He could have been on his way out."
"Don't be alarmist, Xifu. If he had been deeper into the annex, . . . "
"With all due respect, there's no way we could know. He could have been in every room, touched everything, seen every secret place."
"I should remind you that you are both children and you lack knowledge that I have. Do not be afraid: he has nothing to hold against us. He has seen nothing."
It was true, but he was terrified at her confidence. How could she know? The three had entered from without. The Chambers were famously empty.
"Mother, you are so sure?"
"Yes, Kia. Of course I am. Watch."
Dorian felt, suddenly, an enormous claw clasp him around the neck and launch him suddenly into the forbidden doorway into the deepest secrets of the monarchy. He rotated slowly, past the siblings, so close he could hear their hearts vibrating inside their thoraxes, past the curtains that divided the antechamber from the terrifying reality of domination by an alien race, and as his feet dissolved, then his knees, then his waist and hands, he saw the force field rip the molecules of his body out of his clothes and he was blinded by the terrible burst of vibrant crimson. He would never see inside the royal secrets, but the camera in his pocket would. It was always an accident that tumbled tyrants. 

2.8

Once I saw a proud, gnarled tree, wrapped around an outcropping rock, all support having long since fallen away, leaving the roots warped and twisted into fissures in the last bastion of stone. The snow was falling in thick sheets and soon the valley below would be obscured from sight, the sky already a lowering layer in a thunderous press. The tree was unperturbed, unmoved, unchanging. The flakes accrued and the branches were unaffected. But as I watched, a wind, terrible and cold, rushed up from the valley and tore at the lip of the canyon. The atmosphere itself fell and twisted as the air flashed up with increasing speed. The snow, once lazily falling downward, was ripped from the tree and thrown again into the air. The branches, once still, sung with the violence of the storm. When a tree feels this strongly for a blast, does it think the storm foolish for trying to blow it down? On the contrary, it grips its roots and howls back at the wind, trying to join the noise, to be part, to be witness. Be my wind, and I will be your tree.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.27

The Troubles
U2 (and Lykke Li)

Who left this child in me?
I feel aimless, but it's not my fault, I swear
There's a thousand years between me and adulthood
I'm an adolescent
I'm immature
In a body pounded flat by the years
Hammered to a papery-thinness
Still wishing for summer vacations and the end of school
There's nothing inside me besides
I couldn't fit more if I wanted
This baby has grown

Lyrics
Love is not accidentally finding out that "somebody stepped inside your soul (oh no)." Love is not realizing "somebody else was in control." At least, it shouldn't be. Bono and crew have written an ambush, a surprise. I don't think it's good to treat your love this way, to wake up to it suddenly. I worry that so many people have no idea how to walk into a relationship with their eyes open.

I worry that maybe I have no idea how to walk into a relationship (with my eyes open.)

But when I do open my eyes, I see such simple things. Do other people not see like I do? Am I the only one who blinks the sleepy crust from my lids every morning, or am I fooling myself into thinking other people are more foolish than they really are? Let me lay it out for you so that you can understand what you already know. Folks make these unbelievable generalizations about what men want and what women want, and it's all doublespeak to avoid the scary bits, the truthful bits, the things I think everyone knows and nobody wants to say. The recipe for falling in love with someone is simple.
Trust them.

I know you shouldn't, you know you shouldn't. We're all adults here, we know how broken hearts get made. It's the same cussed recipe. Pick things to trust this person with, even though perhaps it's a little cockamamie. Tell them your secrets. Explain to them transparently what you're doing and why. Say the exact words "I'm going to tell you something honest and scary. Honest because I want to tell you the truth, and have you tell me the truth. Scary because I will have to trust you when there's no possible proof that I should." And then, if you're so unbelievably lucky that they pay you back in kind, with fear and trust, you will find yourself under a magic spell so powerful that your biology will never be able to break it: a legitimate relationship, built purposefully and with full acknowledgement by both parties.

I remember an ancient relationship, the first I really felt deep down, and we played Truth or Dare. The game was 95% Truth: a constant heady rush of telling the other person things we didn't think we'd ever have to dig out for anyone, and yet here was a person who trusted me enough to tell me about an unforgivably embarrassing first kiss, and I would be a heartless cad to not tell about the time I mortified myself in front of God and everybody and the whole school by shouting the most juvenile joke imaginable, and why shouldn't the stories continue, and suddenly the whole night was taken up with small increments of trust and the sun came up and the world shone bare light on the small sprout of a new relationship. And the Dares were sweeter than pure maple syrup because I always knew the boundary of trust was beyond anything I could push with a Dare. I knew (or thought I knew) the secret places of a person's heart, so nothing could scare me about my body anymore.

It's the same with anything. Humans are terrible and lovely, and if we fake a thing for long enough, well. It's the same as doing it. If you want a relationship, really truly? Act as if you have it. You know it's true. It's just maybe you've not yet put words to it.

Stephen
I know you picked this years ago and you're in a very different place. But I feel like what you wrote is identically true today.

"There comes a point when you realize what happened. Now matter how much you may love, be in love with, or even afraid of the person…you have to let go. You can’t keep denying yourself. You can’t keep blaming yourself for what they’re doing to you. They may not even understand or know what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter. You have to move on.

That’s what I’m trying to do."

I guess I should write about this, too, about the awful whiplash of having someone walk away when you trusted them so much, when you both knew neither of you could ever under a million crystalline suns in a million perfect days ever earn the keys to a person's heart. I guess I should write about the crash and the pain, but I have felt it. You know I have felt it, if you know me (cold rejection, burning anger, violent apathy all), and honestly?

I have such abject sympathy for the old idiocy:
Better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.
-Tennyson

2.6

I think of it, the impending and imminent, and I cannot think of loss or sorrow. I have only the time between, the now-time, to make the use I can. I would prefer to make a castle of clouds, or a song of stories, or a beautiful moment of the small nothing you said. I would prefer to use my time being thrilled. If I don't, I'll always wonder, and I'll throw my head back and sigh, and I'll say to myself softly "I wonder what you're doing now?"

2.5

The soft running of the river pulled a thin strand of my consciousness back into the real world and I woke with a start. The hair on the back of my head was mashed flat by the cycling gloves underneath, and my forearm was tingly where it had laid on my forehead. Book? Still under my back. Bike? Still against the bench behind me. Brain? Screwed on, I think, but a little screwy too. I flipped my legs over the
Okay
And I stand
I stood up, not quite confident on my wavery legs, and I pull everything together to ride the seven miles home. Blinking, I pull my watch up to vision, and try very hard to slap my brain back into shape for a few simple calculations. And if I arrived at, what, noon? Noonish? And I read for an indulgent forty minutes? I slept for an hour on a park bench with my kindle and phone and wallet just in my pockets.
I would prefer to trust humanity. I would prefer to live well, and happily, and be disappointed only when I must. I would prefer to never be pleasantly surprised--because I expected the best of everyone.

I was parked in a very sketchy lot in Victorville. I had the door open to my RV and I was trying to make supper on my camping stove when he walked by. We started a conversation. He had a few shopping bags, he was black, he was alone. I asked him if he wanted any of my beans and rice, and I got him a bowl, and he ate with me inside my home. He tried to sell me a radio he promised was brand new. It occurs to me now that his price was suspiciously low. He was polite when he asked if he could smoke. We talked (actually, he talked, mostly, and I listened and chimed in with almost nothing of value. He and I are from very different worlds, and honestly? I think he just enjoyed having someone listen and be kind.
Through the blinds, he saw a woman he knew, and without asking, he called her in. They had a conversation about the people they knew, about the places they were going (nowhere. Victorville. This place or that house.) They laughed about things I didn't understand. They talked and talked, like they hadn't seen anybody else all day and all the words were pent up inside them and just struggling to get out. He told her I didn't smoke. She was incredulous. He tried to sell her the radio. She was nonplussed. He told her I was the best looking guy he knew. She didn't respond.
When she left, he asked if I knew any women. We should get women and bring them back here. No thanks from me, man. Of course, this wasn't the end of it. If I was hard-pressed to end the night without a very questionably cheap radio (his price dropped from sixty to twenty as we talked), it was like talking down a man from a ledge to get his phone back in his pocket, to keep women out of my house, to convince him I didn't want to have sex with someone I had never met and would prefer to never meet. He said goodbye, but not after talking for so long I have forgotten every word of what he said.
I locked the door sometime after he left.
In the middle of the night, I think sometime after one in the morning, two men parked their car with the headlights pointed at my vehicle and shouted and banged on the door. They called a name--Andrew, maybe, or Dayton, perhaps, or Tejon. They knew he was in there. Just open up, man. I dripped a terrified sweat. I wasn't sure what I should do, so I sat still and didn't.
Long after they left, I checked my phone. I didn't tell anyone. I fell asleep.
In the morning, I rode my scooter to IHOP where dozens of parishioners were tanking up in their Sunday clothes. I looked around and saw no two people alike, and no one like me. I ate three pancakes and I felt at home.

Today, I reaffirmed my life's story, and I felt healthy and whole. Today, just like every day, I felt at home.

2.4

December 12
Bought a new car, trying to sell the old car! If you want it, send me a message. It still runs, just wanted a new car!

December 18
Sold the old clunker to a guy from Nina's school. He seemed happy, and I've got cash in my pocket. Holla!

December 18
Going out with the girls to celebrate!

December 22
I know you haven't heard anything from me in a few days. I've been in the hospital after a bad accident. I'm okay! I'm out now! But I've learned my lesson. Mostly damage to the car, though. They had to cut me out--embarrassing! If there's one thing I hope for, it's that other people will look at this situation and learn: never drink and drive, not even once. It's just not worth putting your life at risk.

December 25
I have the most wonderful daddy in the whole world! He got me an almost identical cruiser to the one I lost in the wreck. Love you daddy!

December 31
Out with the girls--we're too much!

2.3

Today was the most summer day I've had in a long time. I met Mike in the park because I was playing my cuatro and singing maybe too loud (but who was there to care? The closest people were ages away). I went on a hike to touch the sky, a new part I've never seen before, and I carried two pairs of binoculars and a spotting scope because I have a burning desire to see. I rolled down my windows and pulled over to help a man whose truck didn't work. All I really helped him with was a memory that humans are kind. I fell asleep too late. I'll wake up too early. It's February, and it's summer.

2.2

I can't find my glasses anywhere. The ache is building behind my eyes, and I just know, prescience or experience, that things will get worse. I'm in the store now, and I've already purchased my items before I notice I've picked up a can of ham instead of the black olives I set out for. My burritos will be extremely odd. I hang the grocery bags from my handlebars and push away from the lot. Every car that passes makes an otherworldly noise, accentuated by my growing headache into a wailing song, a keening roar. There's only two turns and two miles to home, but I miss the turn and have to recalculate. I'm deep in a neighborhood I don't really know when a sidewalk creeps up on me and I overcompensate, swinging my handlebars wildly. The bags smash against the front wheel, and the can of ham falls out and lodges itself firmly between the forks and the spokes. My bicycle stops much faster than I do, and I fall head-first to a vaguely-defined ground. Luckily for my spine, my head breaks my fall. Not entirely, I guess, but what little vision I once had is now swimming with stars. I can hear the back wheel of the bike spinning lazily. I can see blue sky and a rim of trees. I notice a small figure loom up on my right. She can't be more than four.
"You're stupid."
She's not wrong. I get back on my feet and walk my bicycle home. It takes me an additional hour, and the sun is setting when I arrive. I strip off my street-grimed clothing and collapse into the shower. Turning on the water, I feel something brush against the back of my hand. My glasses were slung around the cord of an old shower pouf. I put them on, and the steam immediately blanks my sight.

2.1

Fortinbras lives.
I named the bat who didn't know any better than an accidental afternoon in Fred Meyer. I named it because it touched my life when it touched my arm, and cost me up to two thousand dollars in emergency room bills that I've been struggling to find a way to pay. I named the bat because I will remember it better if it's not some thing, but some one. Live long and well, Fortinbras, and tell your grandchildren of the day an idiot licked his arm where you clambered, forever altering his fate and also making it much cheaper to be bitten by a rabid animal in the future. Well done, Fortinbras. You will be missed.

My mother cleaned things from the fridge, hoping to have more space and less hassle to clean. I taught her a lesson about fridges by writing FORTINBRAS LIVES in cheery plastic magnets for her to gaze at hatefully every day.
Call your mom. She loves you too much to be lonely today.