Then for What? It’s in Her Kiss. Bowing Out. The Things that Make You Beautiful. Residue. Let’s Play Master and Servant. Fur Bearer.

--The girl that cuts my hair tells me that she has chosen the name for her daughter.
She’s not pregnant.
She’s not married.
She doesn’t even have a boyfriend.

But she’s got a name for her daughter:
Davede Jade

She says of that name, “I want it to be different but not just for the sake of being different”


--So there comes a kiss that really has the power to move.

The power of the kiss does not relate exactly to how she performs it.

Rather, it is that it is HER kiss: it is that it is her lips; her tongue; her breathe.

It is that she is giving those things to you and those things are valuable because they are hers.

Because she is valuable.
Exactly what makes her so, or anyone, I do not know how to say.

--As my father told me when I was young: for someone who wants to be a writer, you’re awfully inarticulate.

I don’t have the language for the important things.

--So maybe this girl flies in under the radar.

At just such a time when the music has not ended but reached its crescendo, and all the dancers are frozen.

Delicate in the stillness and honest with yourself and tired, you can’t imagine catching the beat when it comes round again; you can’t even image moving.

--And I think: is the feeling I have for this girl organic or have I invented it?

--I study her face.

She studies back.

She is brave in the way she stands before me. She doesn’t even blink. She tries to hide nothing.

There is in her that rare ability to separate from all manner of self consciousness. Her hungers are there, more visible than mine, as visible as any I’ve seen.

It allows her to reach a moment of absolute vulnerability, and in it we are connected.

It makes her very beautiful.

--I mean everything I say as well as I can mean it. As well as I can say it.

And there is no love born of a moment but there is some kind of momentary love, something that happens in an instant, during some exchange of eye contact or touch.

Its residue is on you long after she is gone, long after the scent of her is off your sleeves.

--The situation is flawed.

There is the boyfriend to whom she must return each night.

And I know how these things turn out; I’ve already written this story.

I know no two things are separate when kept in the heart of one person; I know how a heart divides.

--Throughout my life I have tried for control.

In the last potentially good relationship I had, we fought not so much to see who would control but to see who would not be controlled.

The battles were waged over insignificant stretches of land, Hamlet’s yards of straw; but it wasn’t about the battle. It was about the war. And in this war, neither person recognized that an alliance wasn’t just possible, but necessary; both were so afraid of being occupied that that would sacrifice anything to avoid it.

And did.

--I didn’t recognize it then. In the heat of the battle I’m sure most soldiers don’t know what they are fighting for beyond what feels like survival.

--Muscles around the wound tighten, as if to brace against it, but they only pull it taut and increase the pain.

So it is with feelings, even joy. I find myself flexing all around everything I feel and experiencing them not as they are organically, but rather as they are with the twist and pull of constriction.

I am learning, just now, to relax the muscles, and let the wound burn in its own way, let the joy flow out as it will.

This is called surrender.

--My friend K calls very early in the morning.

She tells me that she and her husband haven’t slept together in two years.

And I think of all this foreverness that was never meant to be.
All these false constructs of bonding.

--And my friend CG tells me that he has never been legitimately tempted to cheat on his wife, or any girl that came before. Men, he suggests, are not typically like women; most men will cheat.

Women, he emphasizes, aren’t like that.

But I think they are.

I think: a woman with a man in her life knows precisely what she is missing. She is then susceptible to the recognition of those things in another man. Perhaps she will even project those things onto him.

I think: we’re all so easy, really. Made weak and open by our focus on the hole around which the donut grows.

And I admire CG, because even if he doesn’t know about women and men, he knows about himself, and when he says that he has never been legitimately tempted, he means it.

--A woman I work with shows up with a scarf made of dead and peeled rabbits. Nobody wears fur well, but on people who profess themselves to be humanitarian, concerned, emotionally intelligent in any way, it is especially despicable.