(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.

(expedition)

X.

         We are on an expedition. Maybe Mom, maybe Dad, maybe a guide. Snowy pass high up in the mountains, starry starry sky I can't look away. Can't look at the aurora, don't look at what the others see: must look at the stars. Find Orion, it doesn't matter I don't. There is a guide who sits in a white plastic chair, always sits there, out in the snow off the path, facing the path. John Muir, perhaps. I don't remember what he says; my two Anybodies are listening for me. The two who are my companions, the two of the group that survive with me. If they are Anybodies, I'm an Anybody too; I'm me, I'm a girl I'm a boy I'm neither. I'm a character in a movie, I'm a child. I'm a Lost Boy, The Lost Boy, but I'll never know it. I'm living androgyny, I'm living a roleless role, I'm free and I'm dreaming and I'm living.

         Our group has made it across the dark snowy pass and back before, at the start of the dream. We are going Back, Enya is singing and off the path towards the guide's fixed chair there's a leafless twiggy tree, growing out of the snow, not quite tall as myself, young and colorless because it's dark. It's sleeping 'cause it's winter, it's night time. Enya is sounding, water shows the hidden truth, and under the tree is a dark violet iris, violet amaryllis, violet violet, so deep and dark that it's the color of the sky, the deep space of the backdrop to the stars. I'm looking at the flower; it's not growing out of the snow, not growing but eternal just the way it is, there like a spirit not touching the ground, a stem with no roots. I'm looking at it as though I were sitting in the chair off the path, a few feet from the tree; as though I'd gotten up out of the chair and squatted down by the violet, in the snow, with the snowy pass and the Anybodies still on the path. The Anybodies still waiting, watching the aurora, in the background of my vision of the violet. I don't know if we're going Back to where we came from or Forward, to an equally unknown. I don't know which way we are going, where we are going.

         We dabbled in the land of the Rock and the Bank and the Waterfall before, not enough to remember at the start of the dream. So our group returns, we're on the mountain pass again, still. Now it is dark and snowy and Muir's chair is empty; it is quieter and harsher and darker than the last time. There is no violet. My eyes are spinning the sky, crossing and uncrossing and blurring and whirling fast, searching. All the stars that I find are Anystars, not Orion for sure. So many stars, not Orion for sure. We lose members of our group somehow, somehow it's just me and the two Anybodies, we make it down the steep, steep mountain, the steep slope next to the jagged cliff like a castle to the bank below. There are rocks that look like huge castle bricks embedded in the cliff; it almost looks like a castle tower. We make it to the bank, the Wild bank of the wide wild river, the river that has just two banks to beach on, each on one side of the Giant gray rock, which juts into the river like a thorn in its side. Like the thickest, heaviest splinter; splinter of gravity splinters the flow, splints the wide wild river. The bank, Wild bank, at the foot of the mountain is on the downstream side of the Giant gray rock. It's Wild beacause it's hard to get to, it's dangerous to get to from the dangerous river, but the bank itself is calm in the shade of the Giant gray rock. It's surprisingly still, it's the pocket of pool at the toes of the mountain. The water there isn't salty like tears because the freshwater snow drips down the mountain's legs and into the pool in the steadiest, slightest stream. The Giant gray rock is granite, it’s bluish gray with flecks of salt and pepper; it's eroding where the river bites and slaps and weeps at it, just above the water level almost to the middle of the river. The wide wild river might be salty 'cause it waterfalls to the sea.

         We make it to the bank on the Upstream side of the Giant gray rock; we have to live there for years, for forgetful time; we guess three or four or maybe five years. We live there for years because it's too dangerous to try and hike up to the mountain pass where we lost so many people. We have rusty-spotted aluminum three-seater canoes, two or three; we only use two. We have orangish-red helmets with strips of navy blue and neon orange life jackets with black buckles and yellow straps like highlighter fluid. Because the water is dangerous; just a ways down past the Wild bank is a waterfall too huge too unknown no return. The plastic weave of the lifejacket cloth and the chinstraps on the helmets is perpetually wet, feels like a leash after a dog walk in the rain, a harness after a frolic in the downpour. Maybe we started out stranded with a few more people but we lost them and their canoes to the Waterfall, or to the dangers of the wild, the power of the wild, the forces we trust. Maybe we didn't lose them, maybe they left us. The forest is dense and lush and wild with tall coniferous trees. The water is wide and deep and Cyrano clear: the greenish cerulean clear of the fountain at Mirpe Square, the clearish color of things we touch and we leave, the salty cyan of friends we know and we touch and we friend for a short time and leave. It's gushing and constant and a body of the force, the body of the force. There are sand colored stones that form the bed of the river, they're smooth and round and born with gray rings.

         We always wear our life vests and helmets when we canoe because we don't want to lose each other. But now something is calling me to the Wild bank: I'm meeting Mollie there, I know she'll be there so I get in the canoe with just a clean, raggedy white towel, the kind we used to dry the dogs with after we gave them a bath. I paddle left, paddle right around the Giant gray rock to the wild bank, I'm in the canoe without my life vest. I'm a boy without a shirt. I'm a child without shoes. The raggedy white towel is draped over one of my knees, partly in my lap. Riverbrown riverwater is sloshing around the rust-spotted bottom, floor to my feet. The Anybodies hop in the other canoe. Now just one Anybody, a handsome actor-like Anybody, Sam-like, is in the other canoe and asking me what I'm thinking, what I'm doing, free like I'm going to die without my life vest, without my helmet. The other Anybody might be another handsome actor-like Anybody, the younger brother of the other Anybody; he is now on top of the Giant gray rock looking out for us. We bank, the handsome actor-like Anybody who followed me in the canoe might be like my oldest brother, but he's Anybody, no questions. I beach on the bank, I don't need to think about the canoe, I don't think about anything but I'm meeting a wolf, I'm meeting her here and I climb up the steep slope towards the Mountain pass we never went Back by.

         As I get to the top of the slope to the mouth of the Pass, I meet her, just like I knew she'd be here. She's here and she's magnificent, Anyage, she's young and old and wise like spirit, has the energy that's locked away in questions that are lived. She's absolutely beautiful and we run to each other and embrace each other and we cuddle and we're together. We climb up the rocky Castle Brick steps to the Castle Brick Cliff. Mollie leaps up on the Castle Brick ledge and lies there comfortably; my arms wrap around her and my hands pet her silky fur and scratch the dark brown soft behind her ears. I flop her ears, we are together, there near the edge of the cliff. We're so close that I don't bring myself to look straight down over the edge, at whatever's straight below, I don't want to fall. But Mollie can see it and she's not bothered, so I can look over the edge, just not straight down yet. Together we're gazing out at the wild world with the most incredible view. It's freedom, the freedom of a wolf, and Mollie is free, is a wolf. I know she has a pack to be an important part of, a wise member as an equal to everyone, everyone is equal in the pack on the path. A pack to go Back to, to be free with, and this is what she sees. I see the lush wild forest, the ledge of the waterfall cut off by coniferous trees, the Giant gray rock and the wide wild river, the Wild bank and the path up the steep slope. The bank that we live on, the Upstream bank, is too far away, cutoff by the Giant gray rock, so I don't see it. I don't see what is straight down, I'm not comfortable as Mollie who is lying on the ledge, but together we see the fifty plus wolves running by the river, my pack or hers, running out of the forest to hunt, to run to nothing to live, to free.

         I have to say goodbye to Mollie. She has to go. I hug her, Anybody is there to encourage and help me down the steep rocky castle brick steps, but in the end I do it myself, and Mollie comes with me. There's a bit of time before we part, and there's a spot of level ground at the top of the grassy slope where we won't roll away. Growing on the level ground is a light brown, leafless twiggy tree a bit taller than myself. We lie on the ground and roll around and cuddle and play open-mouthed like we did when we were children. We flop and roll around and live together with abandon, freely and with each other every second, no time. I have an iPod, the only second I take is the time to pressplay an Enya song, whatever song I click I let it happen, listen to the rain. In my vision is the violet iris, the violet amaryllis, the violet violet 'neath the tree like Mollie and me and it's light and purple like a flower in the sunlight. I'm with Mollie now. I love her, don't keep her; we live together like that, my arms wrapped around her, my hands stroking her fur, face buried in her fur. Every touch the most meaningful touch in the world, the kind of touch that happens because you are loving someone, you aren't thinking about it but you're living it, there is no better moment or longer moment or moment you could wish for but this, and that is the best.

         We live that until we have to go, and I'm not sad and she's not sad because we are still living, we're free and close and closer than ever to the edge, and she's comfortable and I am too, and it's as natural as life as living and breathing and the force we trust, so she stands by the tree and watches me leave with Anybody. We are parting ways, going Back Forwards to our packs, she to her wolf pack and me to mine. And I can still feel her fur, her beautiful white and black and brown and sand colored fur, the warm fur that grows from the nape of her neck. The soft feel of that fur in my fingers, the loving feel of it on my lips. The back of her head, by her ears where I bury my face, silky smooth, dark brown, warm. Where my tears collect, when I cry, when I'm a child, when she's my best friend and we're living each other and we're right there with each other for each other. When the rain is the most beautiful thing in the world, when Mollie is the most beautiful in the world, when I was living believing all this on a rainy day, together with Mollie behind the light blue-cushioned rocking chair in the room with the Cyrano walls. I can still feel her, when I am a dog and a child, when I am close to nothing and life, everything and death. When living is dreaming awake and free.

(smell memory)

IX.

A smell that remembers, half remembers

moves nothing into place

but you, remembers—halfway,

moving you into place

to be stirred

can't remember

don't remember

a smell that moves you into a place

stirs you in your place

without a memory to be reminded of

without a space to move through

but the space you must've

moved into, remembered out of

and placed by

In a place with a smell

that stirs.

(Any Where)

VIII.

         The home that I steward is so big that I can step out the front door and I am still inside it. It’s so big that I can travel for months and years and generations and every place that I’m traveling is new. It’s so big that I can’t be a hundred percent sure if I ever leave it. But once I do, I know I’ve left it. I know because I’m not alone, because I can’t get there, because I’m found in a very lost way. Because when I look up at Orion’s Belt I see stars that are Very Far Away, because dreams are not as real as reality, because questions that don’t have answers are silly and don’t deserve any time but free time, because of the reality factor and the world we can’t trust. Because questions that don’t have answers get you nowhere. Because my values, my values means I have priorities. Because I came down to Earth and when my feet found the ground it was hard and I had fallen, and the fall was hard and falling is what I want to avoid. Because falling and hard falls hurt.

         Because of laws like gravity, real laws that I don’t control, that I can’t change, that affect me no matter what. Because pain afflicts me, because I can try and do things to stop or prevent it from afflicting me, ‘cuz I want to get rid of it. Because I can’t live with it all the time. Because I can’t live it all the time, because I fall out of living it because of real world laws like gravity. Because dreams are less real, because I have values and priorities and dreams are silly on-the-scheme-of-things, dreams are silly and don’t deserve the time that real world factors require. Because I can’t trust the real world and I can’t be free until that point at which I must die, because down the line all creatures alive must at some point not be alive. I can’t be free until I die, at which point reality factors don’t matter. Because I can’t, because Because.

         At some point I get lost, so lost that I’m found so I’m neither. I’m neither until I fall and am found by others and together we deem that before we found each other, before I fell, I was lost.

         When I get lost, I am free to attend the home for questions. I attend the questions. I tend their home, the home of my Lost Boy, who belongs to No One, who is still Lost because I do not find him.

         The home doesn’t have a name in itself, but from the ground here, looking up at Orion’s belt, I’ll call it Any Where and it feels very hard to get to. But all it takes is getting Lost. Or forgetting, getting forgotten. From the ground here, Any Where is always getting forgotten, but always getting remembered as soon as I can see it. Any Where is partly in the backdrop, the Backdrop, and that’s why it can get forgotten and remembered so easily from the ground here.

         Lots of questions are also partly embedded in backdrops, in the Backdrop, and they are all unique so they live at Any Where for various varying lengths of Line. I can never be sure if a question has left the home: the home is very big and the questions all vary. It seems to me, from the space that I live (which I call my room—my Lost Boy’s room—at Any Where), that various questions come and go, come and go. There are always more new questions and more old ones, new new ones and new old ones and old new ones. But not old old ones, just more old ones. So I make more space. I make space by turning furniture on its head or getting things to get lost, to hit the next leg of their journey. I know a very small, very plastic shape who lives in a wallet; on the shape is a universal symbol for recycling. Often I get things to get lost when I find the shape and point to the next arrow of the symbol.

As I make space the questions wander by me past me through me. They stop and seat themselves near where I’m working. Some of them watch me work, others make sandwiches on a surface I’ve tipped over and quietly enjoy an improvised picnic; still others play games of solitaire with lost playing cards. I get the sense that some questions were once real naggers, real burdens to the people who’ve since lost them. But here in their home, questions live the possibility of being any way they are without being that way for sure.

         Oftentimes as I make space, a question will stop and ask itself to me, and I will attend. They’ll ask again and again and I’ll listen, and we’ll have a splendid time just living like that, as a question asking itself and a Lost Boy not finding an answer, not answering the question. Answering a question is like killing it, which is neither-either-wrong-nor-right. Sometimes I answer questions, I need to answer them, they need to be answered; they ask themselves and I have the answer before I realize that they’re already gone.

         Sometimes I live the question. In the home for questions, it’s mostly a practice to live questions. Then the question lives, and I am living, and we live together as one so that we are still lost, and living into our answer, the way everything alive at some point lives death. Living in our way, living our way. Mostly the answer is the question, mostly we are neither question nor answer, we are living and living Any Where.