It is so hard to say goodbye to you, these days, even for a few hours- I do the breakfast dishes and then fall into bed and imagine your arms around me, my legs curled against yours- I want to feel your hot breath, but everything in your room is cold- I have you and I don’t have you, simultaneously- I have you only for a little while, life is short, we exist, I miss you. It’s summer, I have you right now. Moments are not congruous, sometimes I don’t have you, I’m in the forest, I feel alone. Having you and not having you. Time, space, everything. It stirs up the sediment of feeling into a great, muddy cloud. It clogs everything. The sediment of feeling that we walk on every day, that we build our houses on. The ash-heaps of everything that has already happened, that wasn’t supposed to happen. The residual salt of time.

I want to water-ski on the top parts again, in unambiguous weather. Instead we are stuck in the basement while rain falls, sneezing dust, forgotten. We are doing the universe’s data-entry on small, yellowed index cards, trying to account for all this time. So much has happened. We are unappreciated, underpaid, stiff clerical workers. Our hands are cramped. We have no personalities.

It is no longer the first day of the rest of our lives. It is almost June, the sixth month of the tenth year of the twenty-first century. History can crush us, if we look directly at it. The inevitability of everything can make us feel as if we’ve already died, while we are still living. Better to believe in the adult approximation of Santa Claus, if you can. The Myth of Romance, which wiped out History, and Stilled the Wheel of Time.