At the movies, Angel asks me if I think of myself as a writer.

"Not anymore, " I said.

But the cruel thing is, I still experience the world as a narrative.




The following morning, then, it is unsurprising that my hand steered itself into the empty back pages of my day-planner to write: Paint jitters in its canisters across the street at Benjamin Moore's Paints, I watch this through the window and the light traffic on Telegraph Avenue. It is safe here, I feel, next to the accustomed regulars. This place does not have a smell to me anymore, though I know it must be coffee and the wood and the cooking onions emanating from the kitchen... Jason's hair  is a golden punctuation mark floating above the bar, it precludes his face from this distance. People mill in and out  of the cafe, creaking the floorboards.

And today, when I follow your directions on the phone and find myself in a not-distant, but foreign location: the church behind the shop. You sit on the sunny side of a quiet street, on the cedar bark between rose bushes. You have eaten your lunch in the sun and will walk back to work later, I suppose, probably with me. So I sit half in your lap and half in the cedar while you express fear and anxiety about the constant state of collapse that is theatric creation... I tell you about last night's dream, about how I flew, about the Mecca of my dream which was shrouded by the shadows of clouds and which my waking consciousness knows to be an untrue representation, about how you were there. I told of the architecture on the hillsides, their verdancy, about the opposition of the dwellings to the holy place, about how my father did not resemble my father, nor my other family members their analogues if they even had any.

I did not say that I met you on a wooden road, it may have been a boardwalk. I did not say that I was conscious of the sea somewhere behind you, that in that moment I knew where the sea was in relation to our bodies. The plane was gone, the one I flew in on over the ocean with my father. I could not see the background with much clarity. But you were there and, somewhere nearby, seemingly endless water.