10.29

I pause my theremin playing for a moment and the machine shrieks as I drop my hands. I'm in shock, of course; I never expected you to walk through that door again, and certainly not while I was learning how to play Billy Joel, and with this half-grown mustache, too. Damnit. You'd have a lot of convincing to do if you wanted me to believe that life isn't run by cruel pixies bent on my destruction. 

10.22b

I told Philip that I wished to summit Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, but it is perhaps the worst dream I've ever had. He mourned with me for the disgusting irreverence required to be ported up a mountain as quickly as possible by a team of well-meaning but ultimately exploited mountaineers carrying half again or more than their comfortable, soft, undeserving patrons. 

The lesson of this was always meant to be about how neither he nor I (and in fact, you) realized that Kilimanjaro is not in Tanzania, but I looked it up, and I was right. Not right about being wrong, but right, which I was wrong about being wrong about. Yikes.

10.22

He flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette—or did he? I'm not sure. I haven't actually seen someone smoking, in person, in years. I didn't observe those who did because I was so uncomfortable that I left. So maybe he tapped the ash away on the window of the car? This is hopeless. He could just as likely have held the cigarette up to his mouth the wrong way round and blown the ash away like the smoking barrel of a pistol and it would have killed the same way. Regardless, he was disdainful of what Samuel Quilty had just said, and if you don't believe me, the thing he did after Samuel implored him to take up his case with the President was that he took a long drag on his cigarette and cut the ash off with a small pair of silver scissors from his breast pocket.

10.19b (or 10.21, if you like)

As one of dust she came to curse me

while I held her bones and skin,

'till I felt her knotted anger,

and she told me to begin.

The loose youth was hanging off her;

in its slack I found her hard.

All her summer self had wasted

soft and lazy in the yard. 

What great sin had been her driver

in the all-consuming plan

to have done with eating substance

and to only eat a man?

"Let us eat," she breathed through flaky lips
locked tightly to her grin,
"It's awfully nice to have you," here,
she paused, "for dinner, friend."

I can't hope for mute forgiveness,
not with memories this crass,
as I pay for all my wanting

and I take a bite at last.

"You're delectable," I mumble,

picking anger from my teeth,

"Like a brief bouquet of passion,"

though my tongue detected grief.

And it was quite the sudden feeling:

to have met death at the end

as a really complex person

with my entrails on her chin.

10.19

As one of dust she came to curse me

while I held her bones and skin,

'till I felt her knotted anger,

and she told me to begin.

The loose youth was hanging off her;

in its slack I found her hard.

All her summer self had wasted

soft and lazy in the yard. 

What great sin had been her driver

in the all-consuming plan

to have done with eating substance

and to only eat a man?

It's the fingernails, I tell you,

that will cut like sharpened glass

as I pay for all my wanting

and I take a bite at last.

"You're delectable," I mumble,

picking anger from my teeth,

"Like a brief bouquet of passion,"

though my tongue detected grief.

And it was quite the sudden feeling:

to have met death at the end

as a really complex person

with my entrails on her chin.

10.14

[I can't come up with anything beautiful or terrible to write about. I am out of practice. I need to go to bed and I haven't even brushed my teeth. I didn't eat a cookie tonight, though they were sitting on the counter calling to me. This is adulthood. I would trade it for anything.]

Do you remember the days when we didn't know where we would wake up? One or the other of us would drive until the sun was on the other side of the world and the lights in our heads had gone bleary and grey and neither of us could see the other one for what they were, and then we would stop and muscle the car into some exotic parking lot space between a tweaker's rig and a college student's Prius and there we would sleep until something ephemeral about the other reached out to tell us that the lights were grown sharp and dim again, fit for illuminating nothing but the other person's face, and we would stretch and ignore the view. I don't think I looked at the mountains or at you in all that time, but I know that I saw. I don't know if we could go back there—any going back is a death—but I would like to have been there, again, now, if you know what I mean. But you can't. The lights are gone colorless and the world is dark. Sleep, and we'll see what we don't look at in the morning.