1
Springtime now and once again she is in Mexico City, and Costa Rica. When she returns, she will want to borrow my Black & Decker drill for some hilarious home improvement project involving a miniaturized television and a rustic-looking armoire manufactured in Tijuana. We are reduced once more to the formal exchange of power tools, and international postcards. I still have boxes of words stored in her garage. I still let her prop me up for guests at the dinner table when she can’t find a real date. I still envy her her consistent inability to be alone.

I would make a shallow comment, but then I’m afraid it would never end. A trickle, a rivulet, a quick-flowing stream, a tumescent river, a gushing cascade of water fall--until once again, I am clinging to your lovely neck for dear life, hanging on your every word, and gesture.

The price you pay for not letting yourself go.

--ah, don’t worry my darling clemency, really I am cooled over sufficiently now. It’s all just clumsy letters and punctuation, the old familiar survey of my hardy spleen’s terrain. Icy slick surface for you to skate over elegantly once again, with your perfectly crimson toes--no more threat of breaking through here. The skittish tap of overly cautious revisit; everything back in its right place, old chum.

I can’t imagine what came over me.

So--

This is the tastiest keylime pie I’ve never eaten. This is the warmest hand I’ve never held. This is the funniest joke I’ve never heard. These are the softest lips I’ve never kissed.

2
In my neighborhood, I am the obnoxiously quiet one. My neighbors gather in the evenings and write up complaints about me. They call the landlord and leave bitter voicemail messages about my persistent long periods of willfully sustained silence. I am constantly threatened with eviction. I am convinced my landlord thinks I belong to a cult of science fiction junkies. He has repeatedly refused to accept copies of the keys to my apartment, on the grounds that it’s an invasion of his privacy. Over and over, he quotes the same passages from the U.S. Constitution, and whole pages of Don Quixote. He finds my use of mimeograph machines appalling, predictable, and really, when it comes down to it, I find I can hardly blame him.

One day I will come home and find my whole life strewn loudly over the sidewalk.

In the distance: a massive neon sign of my questionable self-esteem. Night after night, it shines in twenty-foot-tall letters bright white against the Hollywood Hills.

--"at 27, my father looked exactly like me," I don’t tell my neighbors.

--"at 29, my father wore prison blues and black boots--exactly like me," I don’t tell my friends.

--"at 52, my father has no clue who I am," I don’t tell myself.

3
Meanwhile, on the other side of townsville, we find ourselves in a comatose lounge again, our bodies thrown against one another in a familiar heap of plush gold-tasseled pillows and contentedly murmuring kittens. Our bellies stuffed with quail and honeyed lamb, we watch with drowsy eyes as a very large, hairy man stands over us wearing only leopard-print bikini briefs, grinning, one hand shoved lasciviously down his crotch, and dances to piped-in disco music while reciting a long, repetitive acceptance speech in an unfamiliar language. After a few hours of this, we realize he’s not actually there, but rather, the burned afterimage of television pixels on the backs of our satiated eyeballs. Something tells me there is a lesson to be learned from the hairy man, and the softly mewing kittens, and the dander allegories welling up in me now, but the apparent fiction of the whole thing, and the ubiquitous presence of television nearby, undermine whatever truth might have been there. I proceed to suck the remnants of couscous and eggplant from beneath my fingernails, and order myself another round.

I am too relaxed to drive home these days.

4
"...I tried to work it into the conversation somehow, but then when it came down to it, after all my planning, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. You were just...so goddamn charming. We had this strange conversation that kept reminding me of déjà vu, until I realized we were repeating--sometimes word for word--a previous conversation that had taken place in the same location during a former life when we still hadn’t really met. We kept saying to each other, ‘Did I tell you this already? I think I may have told you this already…Please stop me if I...’ And the whole time, I struggled to find the right moment to break into the proceedings with the bitter truth of things. But sometimes it just feels so good to be...I don’t know. The way you were.... It was just so....

Anyway, in the end, we agreed to change our names, shook on it, and left it at that; by this time, our foreheads sufficiently bruised, we already knew too much.

But what I never told you was that under no circumstance would I ever have changed my name, for anyone. It was a matter of basic pride, and quiet self-confidence. Not to mention all the stationery involved. I knew I was reneging on our deal, but years later, when the FBI finally declassified records of our clandestine meetings, it became public knowledge that you’d actually never changed your name either. Silly rabbit; I was impressed. That’s when I knew--although by this time, none of the authorities would believe me..."

5
Random restless graffiti strewn in hardened acrylic over the inside lining of my lungs (March/April/May/March/April/May/March/Apr...):

I took meticulous notes on a cigarette to remember you by, but then of course I smoked it, like always.

It’s the persistent ash of illusion for illusion’s sake.

It’s virtually all the same exhilaration, without all the hassle of cleaning and scrubbing next month!

--come on, nobody actually wants to BE in love these days--just FEEL like it. Over and over and over again.

That mischievous pudgy fingerswirl of celestial chemicals. The inevitable subsequent drip over perfectly exposed toes. The drying, and hardening, and cracking.

Patterns, gestures, articulations from a long-dead world.

"...lose all self control baby just can’t steer..."

Wait--I think I may have told you this already.

Now these words are in your head. Again.

"This is the highest risk I’ve never taken."

"This is the wildest solo I’ve never improvised."

"This is the greenest spring I’ve never sprung."