When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

She looks up at me, still rocking. “Henry . . . why did me decide to do this again?” “Supposedly when it’s over they hand you a baby and let you keep it.” “Oh yeah.” --Wednesday, September 5, 2001

There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

…she smiles in an exhausted but warm sort of way, as though she is a brilliant sun in some other galaxy

absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.