…Reading Time’s Arrow, a gift from a woman, awhile ago.
I feel stupid reading at the gym, but I do it anyway.

And this book, I’ve tried to avoid reading it, but now that I’ve started, I find it hypnotic.

(Just because she gave it to you doesn’t mean it’s bad.
And that it’s good, that really has nothing to do with her giving it to you.)

And anyway, that woman is gone, I don’t know where.

You have to careful what you read, what you listen to.
The things that girls give you, these Greeks bearing gifts.
It is how they try to get into your head. It’s how they try to establish territory inside of you. If the piece is strong, if it moves you, if you like it, or godforbid, love it, then she has linked to you through it.

(I know this because I give books. I give music. I stake claims.)

Try to sever that link.

Try to wring her out now, you who are so addicted to wringing things out.


…The first book I got from a woman, a long time ago, it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

This is a book that if your capable of crying for things that are outside of you will make you cry.

This woman, she’d written in it, I simply want to give you something I love.

I keep the book, twelve years later, having read it once. I throw little away. I can dredge up her face if I want to. I can imagine that she is alive in this shared world if I try.

Have I told you this story before?

(I know I’m repeating myself.)

…What does J Eric Miller write about?Girls
Exercise
Parenthood, sort of.

What has his life been about?Apparently, these things and little else.

Everything there is to voice from the limited resources of his mind has already been voiced.

Whatever he is trying to show you about his heart, his soul, if you believe in these things, you’ve already seen it. Whatever value you’ve placed on it, it’s already set. However you’ve damned or praised it, it’s been done.

(Sometimes when my brain talks at night and I can’t sleep for it’s chatter, I just start screaming ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh


Sometimes I clap my hands against the outside of my skull.
Try it.
In it’s way, its addictive.)

How will he keep his audience?
With some magic tick?
With some promise?
By uping the stakes?

Can he not find new stories, different way to see the world, and different things to see in it?

The situation is dire.
And a sort of relief.
The way you feel when your house has been robbed and all the things you tried to own, they’re gone.

“You get used to an empty room”.
A blank wall.
A wordless bubble.

…The pain we feel while doing things that cause the pain is much less than the pain it will cause us to feel more of after we are done.

…She was thirty something and it was the year before I turned twenty one, wintertime in Montana.

Missoula, that college town. In retrospect, I find it charming. And safe.

I memorized an ee cummings poem I knew she liked.
She gave me The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
And that inscription.

She was engaged to a friend of mine, a sort of friend really, a guy who hung out in my crowd. Or, I suppose, it was that I hung out in his.

(That marriage never happened, but it’s not happening had nothing to do with me. Those long engagements. That sort of silliness).

…Her apartment was a brick building with a stairwell on the outside, open aired, steel step that clatter when you run down them.

I was always running down them.

I wanted her and she frightened me.
I didn’t understand the complications of the world then.
That she and I could seem to be growing closer while she moved toward some white gown date.

(You don’t believe this about me, but once upon a time I didn’t think things could work like that. Men and women, they said love, they sunk into Eden, they waited happily through their lives to die [anyone died one day i guess/and noone stooped to kiss his face/busy folk buried them side by side/little by little/and was by was/all by all and deep by deep/and more by more/they dream their sleep/noone and anyone/earth by april/wish by spirit/and if by yes]).

It was confusing, that we could be alone and she’d want to touch me. That I’d want to touch her was a given.

(I didn’t know then about the exit strategy a woman will try to turn you into. About the transition she’ll ask you to become).

It was confusing that we could all of us be together, her lover and me and her and other friends, bowling, or playing tag football. That we would could go sledding and eating pasta at D’s house and drinking wine and they could be, that engaged couple, so…I don’t know…together.

(I didn’t know about secrets then. Nor divided hearts.
You won’t believe this, but, once, I was innocent. [and only the stars can begin to explain/how children are apt to forget to remember/with up so floating many bells down]).

That strange winter. Dark early. Everything happened beneath the stars. Everything happened with the snow falling softly.

…How she and I would go to the movies.
Meet for lunch.

And I memorized a poem for her. And she gave me a book.

She’d lean into me and I read out loud that book to her, my hand moving up her thigh like it thought it had to sneak.

How patient she was with me.

And how these sessions always ended with me running away. Not just down the steps of that brick apartment building. But out, across the field, all the way home.

…There are many times when I wanted to be young again. When I wanted to unknow what I’d grown to know.

When I wanted to unwant what I’d learned to want.

…I read at the gym. It keeps me from the company of people I’ll never really know and the boredom inherent in the absurdity of all this effort for ten or fifteen pounds more of muscle, something a family of four could eat in a day.

This girl gives me Time’s Arrow and I put it on a shelf. Not letting her in my head.

One day, when I’m safe from her, when I have nothing to take to the gym, I pluck it down.
I begin to read.

…Time’s Arrow, it’s about a soul that gets stuck in the body of a dying man, and then starts to witness from the inside the life of that man.

But that life is moved through backwards. The soul it sees everything unwinding, people walk backwards and say goodbye when it seems they greet, for the soul it doesn’t know this is a tale told in reverse.

The soul watches through the eyes of a man who daily grows younger in place that ends in children seemingly stuffed back into their mother’s wombs.

Two people go into that room, that room with the forceps, the soiled bib. Two go in. But only one comes out. Oh, the poor mothers, you can see how they feel during that long goodbye, the long goodbye to babies.