28 years

It has taken 28 years for life to seem irrevocable.

FLAME MAKES WAX OF CANDLE

I'm so hungover it hurts.  Obviously.

Dream logic

About a week afterward, I dreamt of entering the hotel room where we fucked and finding it empty of you but full of books that you'd read and left behind. There were at least a dozen, and under dream logic it didn't seem strange that you would have read so many in only three or four days. It made sense to me that you had, and that you would read fiercely and fast and leave behind what was finished. I didn't remember the dream as a dream and so it burrowed somewhere deep in my brain and became part of the way I understood you. It was months before I was able to extract it and identify it as an impostor truth. How had I failed to square it with the real fact of your enormous library? How had I ever thought it possible that you could be so unattached? I once asked these questions aloud to a friend and she stared at me, eyebrows flat, and said: The books are you. That's what the dream's about.

I hate that kind of clarity. 

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.

Lucid

This is cinema, I suddenly think, neck snapping up. I can almost see myself shrinking in a frame, sitting in the window of a cafe in Mexico City, till I realise it's not a film but a dream.