STAYING POWER

"If you leave now, we're over," she said like a wet booklet of matches.

A discrete thing

Full disclosure: I am drunk. A blizzard is approaching, I am very far away from any notion of home, and so, imagining myself in a short dress in the south of Spain, I have taken myself out in cold, theatrical New York City, to drink bourbon and read a book by candle light and try not to take personally the boys at the bar rating women and rolling their eyes at feminism and distinguishing black outs from brown outs because, really, I'm just as ridiculous as them.

Times like this, it's easy to remember I am not, in fact, so different or distant from everything around me. But I am a discrete thing, yes, thanks to my skin. My skin is a membrane that makes me a unit and contains me and separates me from the world, and it is enough.

This odd solitary adventure is the exact thing I have been seeking.

BLACK AND WHITE

Mascara stains on my sheets from where you cried.