On the Philosophy of a Möbius

       I've been knitting various möbiuses for some time now, and noticing a lot of curious phenomena. You use one long cable doubled up, cast on (using a method that produces what feels like weaker stitches, weaker links) a number of stitches, say 60, and end up with twice that number, 120. You have 60 stitches above and 60 below, and it looks rather like the stitches that you are most immediately working with (those on what appears to be the top) are the positive stitches, and the ones below are inverted (negative). The half twist of the möbius is almost never where the needles meet as it can get in the way as you knit, which makes it even more difficult to wrap your mind around it at first---you'll probably end up knitting 60 (the circumference of the loop, if it wasn't a strange one) and realize that the marker for the beginning of the row is on the cable below and that suddenly one row is all 120 stitches. And as you work with the first row, every other stitch is facing the opposite direction. It gets even better: the stitches grow between the needles/cable; you started knitting in the middle instead of at one end and it's growing out! (But actually between.) Moreover, by knitting every stitch, which naturally appears as a purl stitch on the back (think positive and negative again), your resulting möbius is a strip that's half knit and half purl on one "side" (and inverted on the other "side"), despite your using only the one type of stitch, and despite there being only one side. It would be the same creature if you purled the whole thing; without even turning it inside out. The only thing that would make it different would be that it was constructed with a different orientation.
       You'll certainly have gone loopy by the beginning of this, and you won't know it if you think you're at the beginning. The stitches you knit are the edge of the möbius. They're the first stitches you knit, the last stitches you'll knit, and every stitch you knit between-in. You start in the middle and grow from there, though it's growing between and not out. The beginning and the end are one and the same, despite that you can make it bigger and bigger, adding more stitches "between" the two.
      The topological definition of a möbius is a surface on/in which there is no point at which to orient oneself. Objectively, ultimately. Every point is relative. And yet as you knit the möbius, each stitch you make is unique and individual, separate and identifiable, made of the same never the same material, flow of material, varying in dimensions, mass, consistency, time of creation, etc. Similar to beings in our world, and to particles in general, right? So we can chose a point to orient from, and we do as we beings live life. Everything becomes relative; every measure, every separation, every individualization of anything is relative and yet is what it is, completely and as if relativity never factored in. 
        I like the möbius because for me it symbolizes existence in a way, making one coin out of all 'many' things, even half twists and not. It transforms an either/or, a polarization that can be a deception (in the way that dichotomies can be) and yet still be totally necessary to life, into a both/and. It even makes both/and and either/or one thing . I like the möbius because it reminds me of the middleway, of all ways and no ways, and even if we can't totally pick it apart or wrap ourselves around the paradox, we can still make one to hold and touch and live. And we can gradually become familiar with its nature.
       I'm currently underway with a new knitting near-fiasco to see what comes of a hyperbolic möbius. My dad shared with me a devastatingly awesome project, movement, and eventually foundation started by these twin sisters from Australia, who, combined, have a background in mathematics, art, creative and science writing, women's studies and more, and (to boot!) like to crochet while they watch Battlestar Galactica and Xena: Warrior Princess. They defied Euclidian geometry and lots of stuffy old mathematicians by crocheting hyperbolic surfaces (previously thought to be unproducible) in the image of sea cucumbers and corals and such to draw attention to the world's suffering coral reefs, while at the same time empowering women through a handicraft that's traditionally been 'theirs' and empowering the people by putting this previously inaccessible theory of math, geometry, and physics into their hands, with a crochet needle. They are sock-knocker-offers who continue to inspire the communities of the world on the topics of environmentalism, math and geometry, physics and the sciences, feminism, education, evolution, fiber arts and more as their project continues. Look them up at:
http://www.theiff.org/

And also watch this terrific 15 minute lecture:

http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef.html

      I'm in thought right now about the meaning of this growing hyperbolic möbius. I haven't found that anyone else out there has tried this, but that might be the fault of internet search engines. It's working out, though the increase is slow. I'm particularly interested in the kind of... Uh, reframable amplification that's going on. Lots of seemings. The exponential growth looks strange in a möbius. It makes me think about lasers and mirrors and the conversion of matter into energy and the relationship between matter and energy, matter and anti-matter, and also egos and selfs and consciousness. And space. And the geometry of the cosmos. And also, the dimensions. (My theory is that there's a half-twist uniting the dimensions, as in a twist that folds, for example, the 3rd through the 4th dimension, and that life emerges at the intersection, interjunction of the two, if not from all of them... Still workin' on that!) More to come later. I'll be entering into a retreat in engaged Buddhism, and I'm sure that more will emerge.

From a January Thaw

         I find myself trying to understand the nature of value, of right and wrong, of truth, life, and death. Of time. In the past several weeks, as my migraines have improved, I've been making observations about human and animal nature, from coping and survival and the nature of pain to communication and orientation and desire. Is "keeping" an illusion? Why are we the way we are, what's the point of wanting to hold on to something, like a friend who dies or an experience of clarity, when we lose it anyway? Wouldn't it be more efficient to not spend any energy, any moment on a twisting heart or the kind of despair that takes us close to death (which is always close to life)? If we're designed to strive to flourish as a species, why are we equipped with both cognitive and emotional consciousness, when the two things often work against each other? It's a silly question; I know the answer for myself, but I abandon the answer and cling, closed hearted, to the question when I despair. For example, a couple weeks ago, when the horse I was working with, learning from, slipped on the ice and fractured her leg, severed the artery, went into shock, and died in my arms. When, one moment she was alive, and I was holding her head, and then she was dead. My heart broke, it broke open, letting in all this sadness, and everything else, too. I was happy, incredibly so, to be there with her. But why, what's the point of all of that? Why is life so simple that it can disappear, but so complex that it can't be retrieved, and that it always remains connected with the rest of existence (through at the very least some physical impact that it had on its environment, if not in other ways that we might consider)? 

         And what is time's role here? The only "moment's difference" between alive and not is the term we give to the difference, the change... Are moments like dominos, separate and individual but connected by movement and the presence of another domino? Like individual life forms? But if so, if moments are separate, individual, then what lies between them? Space? Is physical space between moments? I guess I feel like it would be a moment, what lies between moments. The moment between. But that doesn't make sense. If you keep adding moments, dividing a long moment into smaller moments, it becomes exponential to a point where you lose orientation and relativity, you get lost and can't compare what has become an incomprehensibly tiny amount of time with, for example, the endlessness of how tiny it can get. 

         Anyways, I was there, with that horse, while she was between dead and alive. I was with her between. And I feel between worlds all the time, between dreams and not-dreams, between old and new, between wanting and not wanting, being complete and incomplete, and always in reality. It's as if the world we live in, and time, are somehow like a möbius, each in nature resembling a fabric or flow that's two sides in one, and (perhaps) in turn together, combined, another möbius. A half twist that makes for a seamless trip around the dichotomy, makes each trip the same never the same, as it combines even change and no-change. An exponential growth, impenetrable (and yet inclusive and therefore shaped) by relativity. A movement through which there is no unreframable point for orientation, a network composed of framable and reframable everything, anything, something, even nothing. Could the strange loop be allegorical of the nature of the relationship between matter and energy? Time and space? Of relationship between things and/or non-things in general? 'Intertrinsic' emerges from 'inter' meaning 'between' and 'trinsic' meaning 'in.' Maybe a relationship emerges by interaction, as a phenomenon might by interference, and emerges 'between-in' things instead of between them, like in the domino scenario above. Does change come from half twists? 

         So I'm always getting caught in an endless loop of endless loops, of paradoxes. And ironically, I'm always far enough away (that is, not caught in the loop enough) that I can SEE myself looping, and I can be both. Living. 

For a while now, I've found myself incredibly far away from things I used to be apart of and things I used to do automatically, and incredibly close to things that used to be hard to look at, things that can't really be explained (even though humans have come up with thousands of ways to explain them). And time, which can be understood in many different ways; because of time, things that seem transient can feel eternal. Because of time, or partly because of it, there can be paradox, perspective, and possibility. 

        In the past several weeks, I've tried to understand all of it. I've read about it, thought about it, wrote about it, dreamed about it, laughed and cried about it, asked again and again about it, and I'm still living it. All of this. But what I haven't done is articulated it specifically in a way that seems appropriate for school. Sometimes I feel so IN it, that I feel in between wanting to articulate it and not. I feel paralyzingly far away from the kind of writing that one does for school, and rooted in a space that makes me feel like the only language I've got, and the only way I can use it, is this---my own. I know that it's a place I put myself in, and I've got to get over it, that in the real world according to real world values I have to suck it up and develop the skill to write for other people and institutions, in a way that fits the bill. I just can't help but push myself farther away by questioning why I have such values, and why I'm not fully accepting them, and why instead of making the choice I stay between.

  If I've lost you by now, I'm not surprised. I'm pretty lost myself. But that only means that I've got something real to write about, right?

[The above is an expanded-upon excerpt from a letter that emerged last winter when sitting down to write to a teacher. Never did get a reply.]

(two blue lines)

XXI.

         I can be split, lose the epic battle and be lost, never find the greater reach the greater space, like a shooting star shooting and missing---missing from a point of view Frame of reference Orientation, from here on the planet. No, here in my body; no, here from eyes, behind them, in my head in my mind. But to miss and to lose, success is a part of me, somewhere, there, part of me. I split to lose myself like the shooting star, I split to lose to find that I am growing I am going; and my two halves?

         They are like two blue lines. Shoot past my point of view Our frame of reference: without perfection, two halves, shoot forth in sync with each other, connected (not at the ends in double knots and time irrelevant promises, but) in between, and with half twists like möbius strips, withinformation, live, live a double helix, live a loop that never repeats. Living so beyond questions and answers, so not beyond so that you and I still know questions still know answers, so much a part of it so little, such a winding relationship with time that there are times when it's like music in sync, in time with the inconstant, the ephemeral and the little, the thing or things that we can't help but happen, the unseen, the meaning that becomes our decision so suddenly, and never.

         It's like music that incorporates the messy beats around you, the one within you, the dissonant waves of people together, at different points, together. Music that encompasses all this and still makes sense, that (better yet) encompasses all this and makes real sense, sounds, that everything together Sounds. Like music.

         That there are times when we are separate, when we are alone enough to not make a whole with other things. When we can suffer and smile and breathe and think, One At A Time. When a split makes two separate things, where thinking and feeling can fall out of sync and be one thing more than the other. Where art is not essential like blood in my body, because what emerges from between in is separate is something new and of its own without the things that it came to be in between.

         That there are times when we use one time to get to the other, that there are times when we feel neither/either and/or either/or, and/or both/and. When we feel both/and/either/or, and we have reached another bend in the loop, if only because we feel like it is bending, if only because it is difficult to know and not to feel.

         We can be split, you and I, like two blue lines. We can be separate and still we, without tying our loose ends to each other---we are connected between in, incorporating each other so that you are in me, and "I" encompasses we, and then it's not losing.

         It's both.

(halfway house)

XX.

         Any Where is a real halfway house. It's a halfway house for surrealism, more than it is for surrealists, although everything's welcome. I'm only halfway sure if the door is always wide open; some days it seems halfway closed, although you never can tell for sure. Like the pieces in a dream, in the dream, have you ever-sometimes truly been uncertain, of the identity, of an Anybody? Of anything, of some one? In a dream. If everything is like blood, the door at Any Where is the living heart of an animal: In Out In Out In. Out In Out. In Out In Out. If sentences could never start and never end, the sentence I would write here would contain both words, only two words, maybe a million different two words. The door at Any Where is a threshold, is time, of time. The Experience.

         I did not go through one side to get to the other. The living heart of an animal is always beating: never the same beat, never the same blood, always the same, always beating. For all of being living, the heart is the same never the same. The animal is the animal always different, because a moment makes a difference, different moment. I have done things, I was somebody, lots and lots of somebodies, one for every moment who I was, was who I was. And now it's still the same, still different, even now, even now. Even you. Even words, even ever. Even never. It's all real, it's all separate all together all the way all all just one. Just many. More than one. I travel all around, I'm always going to new places, it never changes, even when "never changes" changes, because what never changes is "always changes." Halfway is the only suitable compromise here. Any Where is a halfway stop on the Real Express route, the Expressive Rail trail, the Train Of Thought express, and even the Halfway Railway way.

         It's not really a place that you find, but you can lose it when you travel. I travel all around, and I don't; I spend my life on one train or another, Halfway, and halfway true things seem to be the truest. Halfway thinking feels confusing, halfway feeling feels halfway. Who knows, who knows: halfway is for living. Living is for who knows, and so is death. And so is halfway. All for the other, never to get to the other side. For not for. Half-way-door.

         I am a string, stretched taught between-in No two Points, between-in one strange loop, and plucked; life the measure of vibrations if time the measure of change. Movement, movement. The parts composing me came together, moved me, as though I were plucked, and I resonated with other strings that came near me. Maybe with the collective hum of all strings, each string so quiet, collectively too huge to not be a part of. Now, now, the string moves back and forth between black and white, and every time I get to black it could be white, the frequency so high, the amplitude decreased, no time to orient. Black or white, neither/either. I’m not in either, I’m in both. I’m in both/and/either/or. I’m not moving between black and white, I am movement and between-in. Confusion is gray, but so is clarity; when you hit the middle, it is only living, and there are no words, no words for black or white or gray, except direct experience of Anything, contained in single words and not, not for others, not for always. Fools look at fingers that point to the sky. But there are no single points for everything, for direct experiences, except itselves that can’t be somethings, that can only be living, and dying. Not eithers, Everything boths. The fool who looks at the finger and does not think and sees everything doesn’t need to look at the sky. The sky is in the finger, the finger in the sky, the point doesn’t exist. Only halfway.

(the things I am full of)

XIX.

         A pipsqueak collects coins where flat tears fall from my nose and collect at my upper lip to dribble across a bridge of drawn lips and leak through and go inside before they drip down my corrugated chin. The coins are indian paisas that impress my ankle with twos and fives and the pipsqueak is a hiccup that sews together smothered gasps and garage-zene-zinging and the boy tracing the circle the same never the same on my back, sews them together with a softly fraying string of truncated rhythm and cricks in skeletons and gray solitaire cards and a phone message encompassing an extensive hesitation.

         I like to exclaim I don't know when I am sure that finally I am lost and not sure and full of things and sadness for the things that I am full of. I'm scared of one way but love the one-ways I find ragpicking; like I see the blood that leaves my ankle and taste the pain of the laminate floor, assaulted by all our feet, taste the pain in my ankle, draw a softly fraying string that closes the bag most of the way and makes the string longer than the pain in my chest for all the things it's full of. Cellophane floaters drift with my general layout of vision and trim unseen walls in scenes of questioning, of exclaiming I don't know as the hiccup emerges from the union of bitter and sweet, the birth of terrible clarity and detailed confusion, magnificent gray, as the hiccup is also the seam between the two, between the five between the three.

         My hurting head is beginning to burst in the middle because there are no seams or serges, no edges, and my heart aches and hums sweetly with the collective sobbing of innumerable tiny incompletes, complete in every limb: possibilities grieving for birth and lamenting impossibility, lamenting realization enough to know at least their loss, their impossibilities. My chest swells with experiencing. And neither fast nor slow but feeling generally quick my diaphragm squeezes until I find myself casting the idea of weeping, the air of it, preceded by the labor pains of art and the glicking sound of a utensil stirring congealing mac and cheese, preceded by doubts and slightly sticking lips and peeled-off jelly electrodes and recycling bottle caps with chase scenes, casting the air of all of it, a short air, an emptiness devoid of my fullness and what I'm afraid to lose, casting all of it into half a glass of low-calorie lemonade, at the surface of which lies a lifeless fruitfly whose short-statured emptiness and solitude are ready to accompany my jetsam with improbable solidarity.

(tonight)

XVIII.

         Two nights before I turned 19, I said aloud to myself: "Tonight I'm shaky and strange and dreaming, my throat is tight, I'm hunched and red-cheeked and cold-handed. The red netted pattern of my blood vessels shows through all of my skin, everywhere. I get a shiver up one side of my back, a million smooth pieces clicking together, mutedly, and like a wave through a sea of dried beans. Then one goes up the other side, then again up the first, then both together with a right-side lead. Bent neck, numb toes (the three right-most). Pulled, squished inside the skull, sad. Don't bother with me, I feel like saying. Tonight is for you, not for me. Tonight is for her and him and her and him and him and him and her and him, and when I was sure it wouldn't be for him, I thought it would finally be, in its own way, for us; but tonight is for him and her, too. I was cruel and presumptuous with him, and I want to take it back, but I never told him I assumed and so I have nothing, of all of the things made his, to reclaim. Tonight is not for me. Tonight for me is nothing, and it feels like everything. Tonight I stumbled shoeless into words that sank in clear and shallow water, words that I threw, for me, and waters that still display the words brightly, but not my pulsating toes, which are buried in settled silt. I wandered everywhere, nervous, loose, laughing; not nervous at first, but venturing and stupid and spitting as I talked, so that the dream turned conscious in another sort of way, an old way, the reprehensible way, and now I am reproachful. I'm slow, I've been so slow, and nobody responds to my emails. I was happy to be dirty and playing in the dust on the shelf by the three-pronged plugs, but in my sleep, without seeing it, I felt the need to build, from the top down. In my sleep all I felt was the need, so I squealed that I was more than dust, and lost it all---everything I was pretending to have, even the dust. Now I have lenses that aren't blurry but do not focus, a hunch born of a shiver, and self-reproach like the air hanged by the wind of my own voice that came and swept it all away, and I miss reveling in the dirt.

         "Tonight I picked the other cake, it had eight candles but I didn't count them. I didn't see my mother light them as I watched her hands. I didn't watch her blow out the candles of her cake, although I remember seeing her make a wish. I said 19 was divisible by eight, I wish for nothing, and blew them out, blowing powdered sugar everywhere. I said gloam and floam and Dad said loam, and he was right, and I didn't sing Happy Birthday with the others. I let them sing to me, and for me to her. Like I was too focused on the skin that separates me from the rest, too focused to sit at home and care for her from me. I said I'm sorry to my grandmother as she left; she was in pain and I've been everywhere else but home and not visited her this week. I spent this week in my house, not leaving it much, but never settling, always with my faces planted to the walls, looking outwards but only seeing the in-side, the walls. And the daffodils we got for her and me bloomed all at once, without anyone to love them with time and mind, and my daffodils will all be dead before I notice them, and hers will all be dead before she receives them. We are too busy.

         "I am wearing my favorite black tights and black boots and blue dress and eggplant cardigan, and my favorite scarf around my hair makes me feel like stealing out into the night. Because I could be Robin Hood and Peter Pan and still a girl. But I dressed up for dinner, not for playing pretend and climbing fire escapes to rooftops downtown."

         I said, "Tonight is not for me." And yet here, it always is.

(transplants)

XVII.

         I was afraid, so afraid and I asked myself what I was protecting; my stomach growled.

         Emptiness.

         I am protecting emptiness, and that is not one thing or the other. It is with fulness, both/and.

         It's a new challenge all the time. Last night they wouldn't let me eat the food---all I wanted was the buttered noodles. I can tell with my nose when we're having buttered noodles, because they always serve it in huge round meatstuff-bowls; the white and blue quarter-inch thick plastic entrée bowls, reserved for acidic smelling meatstuff, or buttered noodles.

         It starts like this: I have a friend made in Asia, made of stars; she is built out of well hewed shorewood, with memories of cultural week and toy brick possibilities, a plastic seaside resort with tall single-pane windows, first impression sandals, sandals I had once owned and then judged, subconscious contests in the rec-room, kept constantly at 61 degrees. We have collected and shared and corroborated insight since I first saw her in those sandals. Tonight, today, now I ask her if she wants to go to the pet store, to the fish store next to Lee's Oriental. It is a one-room store, and there are no lights on the ceilings or walls, there is only the aquamarine light from the aquariums. We walk past the dark green goldfish tub, to the back of the store, but I do not check to see if she is following me, and when I pass through the Employees Only I am suddenly alone, in a mass of kids my age, in the cafeteria, of a cram school. In front of me, kids are climbing over each other, fighting to get the food, which is spread over the spoon-scratched metal surface of a huge cafeteria counter. Like a farm trough, but the food is on a surface, not in a trough, because humans eat from plates. Altogether it looks like a wave, of lavender-colored long-sleeves and dark green turtlenecks, orange and khaki shorts, bowl cuts and braids; a solid wave, frozen but writhing in a great struggle against the counter, not breaking as waves should when they hit the shore.

         I go straightaway to where the seating is, I find the round orange cafeteria table where Junior Great Books used to meet. The girls sitting there are all my friends, but never my best, never stick. They are all Asian, and we are all in the same school. We are like driftwood that has drifted to the same shore. She has a knot there, I have a notch here; we slide around on the tide of the same shore, then the tide carries us out, one at a time. We are like handmade driftwood, hewed with differences between-in us that are personal, are the qualities that make any one person different from every other, that make friends or don't. These friends are ultra-smart and academic; they laugh at numbers and nonsense, I laugh at nonsense and laughing. They all have trays in front of them, with plates, with tiny bits of carrot or fruit salad or no plate at all; they jestfully deride each other for not eating enough; it ends with criticism from the girl with no tray at all. There is not much laughing, because it isn't nonsense; because while it doesn't make sense, it is too real.

         I want to get some noodles. I don't need the salad or the carrots or the fruit, I focus on acquiring the buttered noodles and nothing else. When I head back to the flat trough, there are not so many kids, just a few, come and go. I see a quarter-inch white plastic bowl on the metal countertop. I run to it. I grab a handful of buttered noodles. I can feel the shreds of Parmesan between my oiled fingers. Just a handful is enough; I turn to run, to getaway with my noodles, to make it to Safety, but in front of me is the Foulmart. My arch nemesis from childhood. Shorter than me, and thinner, with thinner edges, thinner lines to cross, crosswired, trip wires that set off severity. The veins on his hairy arms, on the back of his wrists, over his bony hands are permanently bulging; I heard in high school that he got into steroids and I know that he's still competitive.

         He knocks the noodles from my hand. He apologizes. I don't mind. He glares at me. My heart pounds, my eyebrows rise, my mouth opens, my hands open, they travel protectively to my Front; I have wrestled this kid before and lost. I have won out other boys, I have beat the odds and not been whitewashed. The Foulmart himself gave me the nickname The Crash Dummy, because he can shoot a soccer ball at me again and again, and I won't cry. But it's been long established that the Foulmart will beat me in a race. He will push my face into the snow. He will not stop if I have an asthma attack.

         He stuffs a snack-sized plastic baggy of weed into my hand and looks around, and leaves. I must hide it for him, so I stick it in the Back-most zippered pocket of my navy blue canvas backpack. I must get it out of here, I must take it to Safety, and on my way out of the school, on the shrubby gravel path, by the fences I meet a familiar looking Latina. She wants to skip class. I take her with me, we duck into a hedge of hemlock because a teacher is coming round the path. When the way is clear, I take her hand and lead her down around the hedge, around the bend, and into a village of shorewood and hills.

         We go round the land-wreck house, where the doors are always locked, where the drinking fountains never work. Where the pale brown paint is always peeling. We go partway up a broad paved street before I stop. The distance is sufficient, it's sufficiently close to the Foulmart's house. I take this moment to glance at the snack-sized plastic baggy; its contents look like biscuits. Croutons, pesto-flavored. My friend takes the backpack, she is All Set for skipping class. I go back to school, to the paper-bag brown stairwell, to meet the Foulmart, and I tell him I left the backpack near his house. This news is sufficient for him. But I never put the baggy back in the backpack after I took it out to look at it---it's still on me, in a pocket, somewhere. A teacher is coming! The Foulmart races up the steps; I spring behind the stairs, under the last leg of the first flight, facing tall single-pane windows, dirty with rain drop stains like calcium build-up and flecks of mud. When the way is clear I look up, right where I can see every hand on every railing on every flight, where someone on the top flight could drop a penny or a notebook and knock me out.

         The Foulmart's friends are coming down the stairs to rob me of the Foulmart's weed; they are not really his friends. I see the Foulmart's hand, on a railing seven-flights-up; I change perspective, so that seven-flights-up is now seven-flights-down, so that gravity can aid me in climbing the space between the railings, the middle of the stairwell, past the Foulmart's friends and to the Foulmart himself, to give him the baggy. The climbing is rough, it takes guts; a railing snags my fishnets, rips a hole on the inside of my knee. The Foulmart acknowledges that I am no girl, and I see he's  not really a foulmart. We are reconciled, finally.

         Now I am arriving for work at ABC, the sandwich place. The building blocks for sandwiches? Or Already Been Chewed? A customer in a molly brown fur coat on her way out the door tells me not to cling to childhood. That I should be aware of my North Node. The brass bells near the top of the door jingle as it closes. I don a dark green apron, I check-in, I nod to the cashier, I decide to go on lunch-break straightaway. I seize two slices of sauerkraut rye from underneath the glass display, ignoring hungry customers. I can't reach the provolone though, or the spinach. The door bells jingle; I pause, look up to see who's come in, and understand that my long-fingered classmate has been hired to work here. I understand that she will do much better than me and I will probably be fired. Success is built into her bony hands.

         I go out the back door with my two slices of rye, I sit on a cherrywood chair that has been rained on. The air is greyish blue, is clear and cloudy and thick, and through it I see the Back, I see the brick walls and dumpsters and Employees Only that make it suitable only for employees on break. The air is so heavy that I don't even remember that Lee's Oriental is just next door. The Harlequin kid comes out with provolone slices and spinach leaves, the B and C, the missing building blocks of my lunch-break sandwich. I look at him, he lights a smoke that sinks because the air is too heavy with cloudy blue clear. I feel like a crate-shaped burden, a burden that doesn't fit on shoulders, on the Harlequin's shoulders; I have moved into his workplace, and I don't fit there. I should get fired.

         I go somewhere else, to whatever age it was when age wasn't established, to before I learned to keep track of the days of the week. To a waterslide, slow and lazy; Safe. To a waterslide of grey-blue ice-floes, like a white and blue plastic river. I float along, alone, on a submerged inner-tube, and I slap the surface of the water with the palms of my hands because I recognize the cookie-cutter shapes on the shore. Two-dimensional trees---there are only two types, two shapes: coniferous and deciduous. I float along, alone, but then the ice-floes break and the current gets stronger and I lose the inner-tube. I must get out of the sliding grey river or I will drown, a white and blue death. So I plant both hands on the side of the slide, the bank, and hoist my upper half up til my belly rests firmly on the ground, like a sea lion; from here I can afford to climb out less gracefully.

         On land I join my friend, we walk up a hill that defies the city, the grassy knoll down which the grey-blue river slides. The ice has melted. She stays put while I run laughing into the river, hurl myself into the flow of the waterslide, which is fast and forceful like the spasms of laughter in my throat and abdomen. A wave crashes into the white plastic side and I see a rattan tea tray emerge at the break like a fish out of water, and it disappears in the great foaming grey undulations, just as I am swept around the bend, just as I slow down to a drift, just as I am floating around the bend of a strange waterslide; just as I have reached the top again.

         I do not take a second trip. I climb out before the current picks up again. Pieces of picked grass and dirt cling to my wet skin, and around me is a designated camping area, a public shelter, its brown paint peeling and bubbling where the moisture leaks in. Campers have shown up; one prepares for fishing, another talks to a third, a girl with rainbow dreads and blond eyebrows, on the bridge that runs over the river I climbed out of. I watch her try to light a poorly packed clove-cigarette; the shredded tobacco hangs out as the paper splits open; her navy blue plastic lighter won't light.

         I move again, move back to the violet construct, on the lucky hill, in a foreign world that's all my own. I am outside of school, inside of love, reuniting with a toe-stubbed lover. I move to plant a tree with yellow leaves across the street from the school; it is the color that is missing. The rest of the rainbow is there, in order, in trees that grow up against the back of palatably painted bungalow homes. My tree is not in front of a home. My tree is not even a tree, it's a ground vine or a shrub, a ground plant, and not baby. The plastic marker states that I am not to plant it near the breast of the tree of the same kind of plant. So it is somewhat lonesome, but yellow is the color.

         Ryuta is standing in his soccer cleats on the paved pathway in front of an orange bungalow. He sees me planting the yellow, and knows that I am back; I see the surprise and yearning in his eyes. But he is in the company of two school officials, so we do not run to embrace and kiss. Instead we wait, I finish planting, finish scooping black topsoil over the roots. I forget to water it, though; I forget that all transplants should be watered immediately.

(questions)

XVI.

         I never run out of things to write. It’s like the act of living is an act of witching thoughts, into existence; an almost unequivalence to the loss of things in the universe. Unless to think, itself, is to lose; in itself, thinking, perhaps, may be nothing. In a person, perhaps creation; in time, perhaps transition. Questions at Any Where are always lost, always dying. Questions, these lonesome thoughts, halfway and full of life, are not over for as long as they are questions. So full of life and with time. With time, questions render death and loss---they are dying all the time. Always moving closer, to an answer, to a death, whether the answer is right or not. Because truth does not really lie in anything, is like a potential energy in all things, and arises between things, so that Truth can really stand alone and eternal, by itself, and still be Not to others. Questions, too, can be eternal, perhaps may never die; the answer that tries to bring a question to its end may not be right, or answer enough. From another perspective; perhaps from another world. It’s an emergent phenomenon, this business of living and death, questions and Truth.

Some days I can feel the balance and the paradox, although usually it happens chronologically. I see one side of the coin, and not long after I discover the other, and rarely I feel both at once and nothing changes. And everything does, because something does and it affects everything. And there is no question. 

         One always conceives itself then quickly dies, of its own. As though my mind were the parent; yet it's always the child.

Is to be this way, to be alive, to falsely deem the Experience a continuous line, and discover, at a consecutive point, that it is not a line? Why do I never need an answer? Do I continue to live this unquestionable Experience the way I am? Could more insight change anything? I never ask these things, I conceive them and never give them life. But then, what is life? I abort this question too. All my answers lie in continuity, even when I see death die. Anything goes, Everything.

(boomerangs)

XV.

         There are other nighttime bends; corners that I round and never keep, loose recollections of the places I've been and hardly been, even in my head where, more and more often, I don't choose to stay. Dirty alleys, pissing behind buildings; walking along an array of empty streets, some cracked and crumbling downtown, some sweating and slanting by the waterfront. Walking forever and ever—pulling myself hand-over-hand down a conversation that's like a rope made from bedsheets tied together, directing my feet. Tired, flat feet. Indifferent self-thoughts, looping; defensive and neutral, looping. Dancing with myself, rocking and twisting and writhing to a beat I never let in, or a beat that walks right past me, so that when I wake up in the morning with circles of grey makeup around my eyes and flecks of black paint on my nose and cheeks and temples, I remember absolutely nothing, save that I had fun. It's not even a deep and true knowing, either.

         Other nights I've walked beneath planes of leaves, whose silver-filmed bellysides flash like squirming silver-scaled fish, silverfish; let my skin crawl away in fear of spiders in the black-dark park; taken pictures with my eyeballs and left the poignant feeling behind with the drunk who pukes behind the building where I pissed. Or I've danced with long lost acquaintances, danced away down half lit streets, to a children's park or a crime scene, donning only a sandlot shirt, my lykafur coat, my running fishnets, held up with mismatching bandanas tied at uneven heights around my thighs. A butt that says PEACE, a sharp engagement ring made from a red plastic twisty-tie. The kind of ring that I lose before morning and don't miss, the kind of engagement that's as serious as skipping pantsless down a street to the dock and singing the manifestos of a pantsless Anybody, a sharpie-colored vandal. That's as serious as the barefoot vandal herself, thieving temporary parking signs, staked in the Earth, and enlightening her shine-eyed pupils on the sneaking oppression that steals blank slates and canvases and feeds minds with pig chow and the desire for more input.

         There are the silly jeans that ripped in the middle, of the ass; the lounge room ash trays into which I've projectile-purged two hours of my night; the excited shouting and inconsolable, angry yelling of young hearts in younger bodies, across ravine-cleft streets, and towels on the floor. Beer moshed down my shirt in a wayward pit of punks, water-flavored tongues that find their own way into my mouth and send me away from bittered arousal and running towards a list of embarrassing acts, laughing sadly with The Way Things Look.

         Tackling another teen, a favorite, a trickster, during a soccer skirmish after school. In a violet construct, on a lucky hill; jumping on his back in a violet fervor. A hundred and forty some pounds in the moment, he not, and not cool and not calm either. Drawing the heat to his cheeks, drawing the flint of confusion across a stone-cold barrier, sparking an awkward fire. Obliging him to carry me to the slowly rolling ball, losing momentum. Whispering in his ear, losing momentum. Obliging him to answer, drawing out his confirmation. Shutting my eyes, beating my head, losing again what I've already lost: the favor of my fervor.

         A missed kiss at a vending machine, a hug that let me go too fast, that pushed me away and pulled my tail between my legs.

         Some things are like boomerangs, for years and small lifetimes.

         "It's all gone in the blink of an eye. How fast life's gone by. How fast it will go by." These words came and went, as fast and as memorable as the pain in three whitish potholes on my wrist. Holding the butts there, to my arm; feeling the details without the agony, paying attention with an attention that school never earned.

         All of these are things I've lost, things I lose because they return to beat my head and pull my tail between my legs, and beat my heart, free the flow through my heart and distend, birth circulation for the realm I write.

         Do I lose them all in the end? Even this I can't ask. Even if there is an End.

(alley)

XIV.

         Just around the nighttime bend there is an alley between two generic, modern, colorless brick buildings. The alley is dark, and clean; the perfect blacktop pavement is wet and shoddily refracts sourceless white light.

         On the street before the backstreet before the alley, I can hear tires nebulize puddles, I can see small rain that swirls around on currents of air, floats like dust, slow like humid smoke; I can see it as it rides across the shaft of one whitish yellow headlight. It's too heavy for mist, too light for rain, too wet for air and too much to breathe. Too warm in my lungs, too clammy on my cheeks and hands and shins. It must look like that all around, the way it feels, but it's invisible without the tirelessly straight white conical beam or the bright, and surely hot, white bulbs embedded on the bellyside of the marquee. Those tiny bright bulbs are bright, but they do not emanate, oddly; they have little glare but leave tiny burning afterimages in my eyes.

         The car with one headlight picks up a lady; I cannot look at the car, I do not look at the lady. My feet sport black ballet flats, the inside walls of which lean far over the insoles, shaped by six thousand pounds of size eight flat-footed wear. They are wet. Clearly I have been trouncing through street puddles; there are a few muddy bits, wet debris clinging to the yellowish white flesh of my feet, from halfway up the shin and down.

         The nobody driver puts the car in drive and glides forward, past me, to my backward and away forever. I am walking on perfect gray sidewalk, perfect square-looking rectangles one after another, doormatting formal romance and expensive sophistication and whitish lights. The curb is flawless, without a chip, without the evidence of the ice pick of the forgotten angry corner of the city's busy mind. There are two small holes in the back of my black legging, half way down my right hamstring. One tiny hole a thread away from its older brother, above the hem, where the weight of the city's lungs leaks in, licks my clammy skin. The center of a mysteriously radial wet spot on the fabric, where water makes a black blacker than black.

         I round the bend, walk up a slanting backstreet. I'm with a group of people, the Harlequin kid included every other time I look. We're walking to somebody's apartment, and the dark is perfect for a camera---it's clearly night but every part of every one, every detail is illuminated for the camera. Like in movies, when a nighttime scene on a street always shows the pavement to be wet, even if it had not rained. It registers better that way.

         There is a piece of plain, thick-crusted cheese pizza in my hand and I am doubled. I stop. I'm no longer holding the oil-stained pizza box. Was I ever holding one? The group continues to walk. There's no longer a bite of pizza in my mouth. Did I swallow it? Was I ever chewing?

         The slice of pizza is still in my hand. The kids are still walking, they're still walking to someone's apartment but they're still in a group surrounding me. As if they're walking impossibly slowly, but I can't tell. I look to the right, I'm facing the right so now it is my forward, and I am standing there, the kids still frozen behind me, the pizza still in my hand. In front of me is an alley, dark and clean. It's perfect, it's striking; there's no place for the mice to hide or the cats to sleep or the trash to live or the smelly dark spots to spawn and prosper. It's devoid of anything, except remarkable blacktop pavement and a mist of shoddy whitish light. And it's encased on three sides: two colorless brick buildings forming the alley, and one clean, glass wall for me to look through. It reminds me of the penguin pen at the zoo, how most of it is fence for one to observe from, but there's one eight or ten foot span of glass so you can see them underwater, too.

         This glass wall is admirable. Even the three thumb-sized fingerprints spread upon it. It leaves one struck with a quarter inch impression. I cannot figure it, I cannot figure if this slick spotless alley through the glass is more mysterious than a filthy alley with no details, where no light reflects and so much is hidden and generally one wouldn't want to see.

         And just like that I am walking again, the wondering ceased and my attention traveling elsewhere. The pizza is no longer in my hand.

         I have turned to the Harlequin kid. He is mute, but we discuss finding sharpies. We speculate about when to get them, and how we will pay for them, and I can tell that the Kid is thinking that he'll keep them, that even though we are talking about obtaining them together, he's really just enlisting my help for something that maybe he'll let me use before he parts ways and goes home. He doesn't live with me any more, but all the more reason he'd leap at the chance to get some markers if I pleaded for my parents to sponsor me, me whom he would in turn plead with to sponsor him. More vexingly, when I point this out, he gestures abstractly, such that I experience him to mean that I "can never think to remember that I wouldn't understand." It always works, see.

         The discussion ends abruptly and we retreat to our proper minds. I muse on the idea of pleading with my parents to sponsor a new pillow. I peel the 100-thread count lavender pillowcase off of the pillow in question. I want to show my mother the mold growing there, but I know she'll just see it as a stain of drool. We are tight on money and a new pillow would be superfluous.

         I have arrived at the apartment gathering. I sit down next to two others on the left side of a denim couch such that I am center-most with the kid sitting down next to two others on the right side of a couch to my left. We are in front of a large square late 90's TV. The long lost terrifying Lolita friend of mine capers across the oatmeal-colored carpet with a bowl of blue corn chips. She introduces a friend of hers whose terrifying face I cannot look at and cannot look away from. She's a young Asian woman with non-shelled purple snails for eyes, she's a monster that would eat you, she's a ghost that would ravish you. And I'm oddly okay with her. She's DJ-ing tonight, and after shaking her hand, I hop over the turntable, scratching the vinyl at a gradual angle obtuse to the grooves as I go. I run over to the stairs, looking back at the snail-eyed girl. With one last gaze cast like a net over the room, over the ocean, over to the monster, I cast away, leave to go upstairs. I bend over on the stairs and plant my hands two steps above my feet. I ascend on all fours. But by the time I’ve gotten three quarters of the way to the top, I’ve lost my mission, I’ve forgotten my purpose. So I swing one leg over the banister and slide down till my butt hits the post, and then I clamber off to the floor. I traverse the worn wooden floor to the mail bin where I discover a tampon for the first time again and naïvely conjecture its possibilities. Icy wet spots percolate through my socks; the grown-ups track snow in from outside and forget to take their boots off until after they've reached the kitchen.

(pain)

XIII.

         My migraines begin with no beginning. When a migraine starts, when it finds me; well there is no place, no point when it's found me for sure. Like the horizon in a gradient, like the birth of gray from the death of black and white. Because when I suddenly get a migraine, I suddenly feel pain the way it's always been there. In fact, there is only one migraine, I've never had more than one migraine, and it is always there, but not always beginning. Like a person you know: all of the person you know, your whole experience of that person, things about that person, is all of who you know you know, and all of that's inside you, always is. It somehow never leaves you, never stays in you, and you forget and you experience again and again; as soon as you see the person again, you know them again. And then life goes on and they are not physically present, and you forget until you remember. My migraine begins in a realm like halfway-asleep, a realm that exists in both asleep and awake, but not between. A No Place when anything could be, where nothing begins and nothing's eternal, and everything confusing can be seen confusing in all clarity, and things that start are not starting when they start. I don't know when my migraine finds me. Perhaps it's my head in orbit to the mass of potential that everything physical and experiential passes into: the chest of the body. And perhaps my head eternally undergoes phases, and in certain phases my head can be seen from the migraine that lives in the chest, and that's where it finds me.

         Pain is a funny thing because there are several ways it can hurt and several ways it can heal and several ways it can be happening and not hurt. It can afflict, it can teach, it can put you to sleep; it can wake you, ruin you, strengthen you, and drive you to a place when nothing makes sense and yet you experience the all-nonsense with all of your senses, and it's so clearly neither-either that suddenly you understand with an understanding that feels like it never began.

         There is physical pain, emotional pain, lonely pain; the pain of inseparability, the pain of winter, the pain of spring, the pain of transience and the pain of For Good. There is a pain for difficulty and a pain for simplicity. Pain can be tiny and inconsiderable, nagging and subconscious, undiscovered. It can be tremendous and sensational, it can carry you away to a sadness you don't want to be parted from, it can raise flags of blood and purpose that inspire waxing wind into your sails. It can steal your sails and leave you drifting to no purpose, it can cycle like fear and paranoia until you feel so alive from suffering that being close to death could not make you feel more alive. Pain can be the decay that fertilizes the soil, that nurtures things that grow. Pain can parent love, and hate, and indifference. It can be felt in every part of the body, of the chest, of the mind and heart, it can be felt it in places that don't exist and it can start and never start, kindle and douse fires. Pain can die while it's living, it can die and still be pain, hammering and aching and breathing in your head. Because pain is a funny thing; pain is both a thing separate from you and your experience of it. Pain knows the death of death as well as the death of life, and if it's seems closer to death it's because you are far from both death and life, which are always close together. Which are always found in each other, which are always like friends we know and we touch and we friend and we leave and we live. There is a No Point when pain becomes the death to your life, and the same No Point is where pain becomes the life to your death. Pain calls me back to my body, like a force that I can trust it brings my head to my chest, and there is water and air, and I can see the water and I can feel the air.

         Sometimes the pain is like a bowl of water; this is how the pain is separate from me. Sometimes when it's there the bowl seems really full, and if I am sitting and holding the very full bowl it means that I can't stand up without spilling it; this is how the pain is my experience of the pain that is separate from me. Sometimes the pain of not being able to stand up without spilling is water, more water put in the bowl such that a single breath would make it spill; this is a point where somehow the pain of the experience becomes the experience of pain. And it's a point where pain that is separate from me becomes a part of me, which is the start of the death of pain while it continues to live and be.

         Suddenly, I don't need the pain of pain, and it needs to be embraced. I can shove it away, bury it but the pain continues to be, and the pain of the pain continues to be. It can't be fought and killed---anyone with headaches must know that fighting headache pain makes it worse, and even medicine doesn't kill it. That if a headache dies after taking medicine, it was because of healing and not fighting, because a thing can be healed to its death. And pain of pain is very similar to the pain; it can be healed to its death, and then the pain still lives, but the feeling of pain has changed. The way all deaths are changes and not losses and not gains and not neither and not change. So I embrace it and I change, and the pain of pain is the part of me that changes, and the pain stays the same but I am living; for my head and my chest the pain becomes life, becomes a part of it, becomes a part of me like a bone in my body. Another sensation to live, another feeling to wake me up, to be awake so I am feeling the No Point that is always there that we don't always feel. The Point that our heads can't touch without our chest, that words don't touch, that's so essential it can't be described, is too complex, too simple to understand without knowing by feeling and can only be lived: the horizon between life and death, the line that makes our heads feel we are alive, and our chests know it.

(a holocaust of wedding roses)

XII.

         I feel it all. Gas pains, flattened against a bed one night broken-in. A death in Toulouse, on a roundabout near the airport, left ear folded forward, face flattened, the incomparable, quick pop of impact, the ringing of boxed ears. Watching a man ring a bird's neck, watching noises, guttural, and a sick pulse between the ears and throat and stomach. The swelling chest of panic.

         I always thought reality would look different, that awakeness would feel less like a dream. That Real would not include TV static in the visuals, nor lasting, lasting impressions of the previous; highly colorful after-images, as part of the picture, the picture lasting into itself, the moment taking another moment to finish up, and another one; it never ends every time a moment finishes, ceases enough to be captured and last. I thought real would look solid, would look whole and complete, and now I think that seeing the sky or the windows or the walls or the sheets, seeing the greatest, most upwards winding growth, or the darkest and downwards and sickest something, blackest chasm---seeing a thing or happening in its entirety, without billions of tiny resonating holes, but filled with billions of tiny dots of what's Really There, that it would crack me open like a nut. The utter completeness of the picture would fill me to a place past full, and blow open the doors of mind and feeling with a wind as unstoppable as the tide, the moon, the earth the sun. Because Everything, a person can't contain and still know; they must be Open, and no more a container than a teacup that's been split in two.

          So that there's no having. That's where we have it all.

         I feel it all, I know it. Peeling sunburn, peeling skin, elastic, wet and burning beneath the dead-not-quite. Raw flesh, exposed, drying out; every drying, dying clump of cells screaming out in blood-curdling silence, in itchy agony, screams that for some reason can only be heard by the greater being they compose. And the parts, perhaps. In not a sound that comes to us, to me, but suddenly, as the more or less direct way of feeling, of existing. The suffering of living, it is parts of me dying, sometimes violently. And that is healing, and growing, and I can't help but feel like the wedding roses from the night before last. Thankfully roses are not like humans, who generally seek some purpose and are saddened by the loss of it. Humans, who would not easily bear the wedding rose's life---to grow for months and months and be sentenced to death the moment before blossom, sentenced to death away from its roots, to not be remembered as an individual, or remembered very often, or at all, or as what was important. The wedding rose, whose service to the external world would be fleeting and not Necessary; it's a good thing roses aren't like people.

         I was a witch that night. I tore off the outer petals, drying, dying, of a huge number of white wedding roses, I tore until they looked newer and more closed again. Then I plunged their stems beneath the kitchen faucet, and severed them where I saw fit, so that they could drink more easily, huddled in a fishbowl, flowerfood and water.

         I was a witch because alone, I alone decided to have a death ritual, to make a ceremony of the dwindling fire in the pit out back and the petals I had torn off the roses, which in all fairness were not that dead. Which were quite alive, and would've still drunk, til the last living cells had lost their connection to the whole, til the water could no longer reach them, til they were cut off and isolated and surrounded by cells that were no longer living, til they had no choice but to follow the parts, follow the whole into death.

         On two plates I heaped all the ivory petals and picked leaves and severed ends, and took them outside to their death; I sat by the cauldron and tried to really Feel each petal before I fed it to the fire, which was hungry, which ate each thoroughly without recognition of its own last meal. The wet stems and dripping leaves crackled and pop-sparked, giving rise to a nutty-smelling smoke; the petals, soft like skin but not soft like petals, perished quietly, lonely. Most petals I kissed, some died a little more memorably---stuck on a burning twig, lasting longer on the back of a log. I was a witch for doing it, because it felt a little like a holocaust, of things that aren't like people. Even the fire died, trying to burn itself.

         The roses huddled in the fishbowl were unwittingly thrown out the next morning; it's a good thing roses aren't like people.

(closet)

XI.

         I steward the home for questions. I live in a space I call my room, but really it isn't mine. It belongs to No One. But I call it my room just the same.

         The closet in my room is the place for death. As we sit in the closet, which is also a basement, and a costume shop, and a jungle in Australia, I tell Laura how I used to be scared of it, how I associated it with the murderous clown of my childhood---the one who left the oversized cake-carving knife in the fish tank, who stabbed family friends and spattered their ketchup across tabletops. I tell her how the cat died in here, and as I do so I dare to glance at the litter-box residing some distance away; it's full of grayish kitty litter but devoid of kitty. She politely points out the circles of oxidized blood on the walls, coughed up by a boy who perpetually forgot to cover his mouth. I guess it's understandable: forgetting real world faux pas like that during the process of dying.

We are sitting on piled up laundry baskets and light blue plastic bins, we are slouching because writers always slouch in decidedly relaxed spaces. There are campers wandering in and out, in and out, new campers and old campers. New new ones, new old ones searching for costumes. Suddenly I want to give her the nine-tenths-of-the-way empty book that I bound, the book with the plastic clock glued to the cover. But it's in a plastic laundry bin past the clothes rack, and I know for a fact that there's a boy hanging up on the clothes rack. A few minutes before Laura came down to the basement, that very same boy with the beautiful chestnut skin was guiding me through the Australian jungle with his brother. We were crossing a river, and his brother had to split up with us Just In Case. There were dangerous sneaks hiding in the brush with blow darts, and the boy and his brother communicated through a series of abstract gestures to avoid being heard. As we crossed, his open hand kept circling in front of his face, palm to face="talk them through.” He continued to signal to his unseen brother as we dashed safely into an outgrove of clothes rack, when a huge blow dart flew into his chest. He looked down at it as though he'd been expecting it, as though it made sense that it was there, and as he fell back dying, his open hand circled his face once more before he tumbled into the folds of my navy haori. He died with his arms stuck through each sleeve. He became the boy in the haori who dangles from a hanger on the rack, the Boy Hanging Up, and the clothes pushed around him so he was lost to everyone but me, so he was waiting to be found by Anyone browsing for clothes.

I realize that the clockbook is falling apart after I shove it into Laura's hands. It's her birthday and we're sitting in the threshold between the gala and the promenade. The gala is happening outside the closet door behind me to the left, and the promenade is up the basement stairs behind Laura to the right. It's Summer Camp on a Field Trip to Australia, and outside the closet door and up the basement stairs the campers and counselors are celebrating safety with the most decadent gluten-free casein-free peanut-free cupcakes. Laura informs me that she has a gift for me, and I fluster because it's her birthday, and I don't have anything to give her. She holds up an avocado pit between her thumb and index finger. It's bright and strange and gleaming darkly like a gem. It's blackish green and dark brown and glassy bright in the center, and it's caked with overripe avocado flesh. One look and I know it'll grow into a tree. I make a discovery as Laura is summoned to the promenade for some staff-related purpose; there is a plastic baggy full of slides on top of the stack of bins at the foot of the stairs. I hold each glassy slide up to the ceiling light, between my thumb and index finger, and I see brightly colored pictures of the avocado seed, of its growth into a tree.

I look at the stairs where Laura's gone. The traffic of campers in the closet is increasing, so I move to one side and wait for an opportunity to exit via the closet door. I seize the moment at the first opportunity one arrives. Past the door, Camp is simultaneously dressing up for and throwing a soirée à la 1940's. The girls from my dorm scurry about beneath strings of ecru lanterns, tossing mules and classy dresses as they go. The space is semi-outdoors; where the walls would be, the black air gushes in with offshoots of the night, over long, wide benches. I sit down on a tuffet of empire waists and slide my feet into a pair of sandals with wedge heels. My feet are scratchy and calloused; they don't slide in well because the skin catches on the suede. The straps are the inflexible leather of an unbroken-in birkenstock. I have to stand up and kick the toe of each heel against the ground for it to fit, and it comes to my attention that the heels are two full inches of cork. "Elegant birkenstocks, aren't they," I notify a nearby dorm-mate. She's hurried-looking with at least three armfuls of shoes. They're escaping her arms rapidly, and when she looks up at me I look down at the silk skirt I'm trampling. I'm slipping in it, my sandaled feet are twisting into it, so I plunk back down into the nest of dresses. The nearby dorm-mate releases the shoes in a waterfall somewhere in my periphery. Then she is at my feet, urging my sandaled feet into a pair of light blue vinyl sneakers, and I try but it Just Doesn't Float. Then I am hit with another realization: this is the third if not fourth time tonight that I've put these sandals on. I keep putting them on, but I don't have the slightest memory of taking them off. They just keep leaving as soon as I forget them; I don't notice until after I put them on again.

I think about the brother of the Boy Hanging Up in my closet. Maybe he's a lost boy now, too. The Boy Hanging Up was a lost boy all along. He died without a question. He was ready for death, he was so free of right and wrong that he was already living death when it came, that living death is just as natural as living life. That's why it's fine that my bed is next to the closet. Death every bit as natural as life: I'm close to it, and all my life I've been Very Far Away from it, running from it like I run from centipedes. If it was near me, I couldn't be okay until I got away from it. Now, so close to the closet the truth is that I own nothing, nothing to keep nothing to lose. So close to the closet, I only am because there is only living, and that includes living death when it is near because I don't own or keep or hold a life such that I can lose it. Living so close to the closet is a freedom, ultimate, and in the freedom there's a trust so great that problems aren't problems and everything makes sense as you live it, a trust so great that it’s free, ultimate, and in your freedom you are living. Living is a strange loop, living is a snail shell.

         Laura has the clockbook whose spine is cracked inwards so that the pages stick out at uneven lengths between the covers. The cloth strip mounted on the binding is lost, the Duck tape I used to bind it is exposed, the washi's deteriorating so the binder's board is poking out at the corners. I suppose it's been in that closet for one point two million years. Laura has it, but I desperately want to show her that it's only nine-tenths-of-the-way empty. My sister is outside the soirée on the prim lawn around the promenade. She's with my mom, showing my mom how to use mom’s new twenty-inch laptop to view a picture Laura sent for her birthday. She sent me a picture too, and for a moment it's everyone's birthday. My mom can't get the picture. My sister and I look into the laptop. We get it to work, when it loads it's a picture of my brother and his wife. It's a movie, and when my sister wants to know who Laura is we are through all twenty inches of the portal, in tall brush, looking up at Laura.

         Her back is turned, and she is dancing away from us. The encounter ends, my sister and I agree that so far, the only lasting impression is that Laura Has a Long Denim Skirt, with denim frill at the very bottom, the kind one can accidentally trot on at any time. But Laura sweeps skillfully away, sweeps away to where my brother and his wife are standing; she pretends to snip them apart with twenty-inch ceremonial scissors. The scissors of movies that a mayor or benefactor uses to slice a giant ribbon, to free-open a brand new facility to the public. She's pretending, and my brother's wife is pretending too, and when I sprint towards them they trot away chatting, all the while Laura's back is still turned, so my sister doesn't get to see who she is. Only her long denim skirt. But I want to get to Laura and the clockbook and the avocado pit, which she must still have. So I run after them, across the soirée lawn, but I'm holding the twenty-inch ceremonial scissors so I slow down. Then I know I'm being chased down, because it's hazardous to run with scissors and it’s Camp. I look over my left shoulder expecting to see the angry directors, or harried counselor, but my pursuer is my neighbor. Blair, Blair, Jogging in His Underwear. He is very old, but very fast, and he's after me because I'm Reeking Havoc and I'm a general concern to the public. I have to turn my eyes back to the lawn ahead of me, and the scissors, but I don't fail to notice that we just passed a fountain with a pool that looked like a reflecting pool. It looked like my closet was at the end of it. It looked like Orion’s belt is at the end of it. I don’t get a second look as I need to focus on my feet, I need to sprint because Blair's gaining on me. After a couple seconds sprinting, though, we both agree that it's best not to get reckless when carrying such large scissors, and he slows down so that I can slow down, so that we are jogging. But he's still a fast jogger, so I sprint again, and we shift between slowing and speeding until we approach the hill that I've decided not to climb.

I give Blair the scissors while we're still running, he's still running. I cast my eyes back at the promenade and there are people scattered along it, chatting and mingling in gowns and tailored suits, holding beaded masks and crystal cocktails and sandalwood folding fans. The masks have light blue pearls glued to them, the fans are sweetly scented like my grandmother's hand-me-downs, like the prayer mala that lives on the mouflon whose feet touch the floor of my room.

         I touch the room. I'm awake and I'm sleeping next to the closet. My feet find the floor, I think the smell of the mala, find half the smell in my head. I lose it, I lose nothing and the gain of living, and I lapse driftless into neither-either-loss-nor-gain. I drift out of that, into a memory; I linger in its feeling alone, I’m feeling what I’ve Found and I am fixed, unintently. Lapsing like that for an eternity. For a moment, before I get lost there. Lost in the memory of my hand with a pencil, with the pressure of life; my hand shading a map of Australia for life, with graphite. With knowledge like a well gushing up from its insidemost pressure, pressure from the center of Inside, the pressure of saving a life. The life of a lost boy who dies. The pressure of keeping his birth at bay and his death from living. Of running from the question and running from the answer, of running from the opportunity a moment arises.