January 26th

I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive

There's only been so many days. In that time--- Khalil Gibran, Stephen King, Oscar Wilde, Elias Canetti, Roberto Bolaño; art by Frank Stella, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Stanley Spencer, Fernando Botero, R. Crumb, Pablo Picasso, Giangiacomo Spardi, Hervé Télémaque, Emilio Tadini, Valerio Adami, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacques Monory, Osvaldo Vigas, and Marius Sznajderman, introduced or reintroduced on dark early evening trips to bookstores, snowed in at home listening to Macroblank mixes, on train rides, in waiting rooms, at after-school pick-up and the odd family funeral.

There have been a lot of nights playing pool and then going home. Some went later than others, like when She met you at the parking lot on New Street and you both went to The Next Chapter,

(She’d never been; this was your second time. You came over the summer when you still had your uncle's Mercedes with no end in sight and bought The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, Too Far From Home (his collected works: short stories and essays), and a vintage Penguin edition of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, although the major or perhaps notable acquisitions were the Bowles books, specifically The Sheltering Sky, even though his story “The Delicate Prey” from the collected is what whet your appetite for the novel and his larger oeuvre, through The Sheltering Sky in particular (its title popping into your head as you were leaving the store randomly and mistakenly because you were under the impression that it was Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, since the vibe and general plots of the books have always struck you as similar or at least reminiscent of certain themes) Bowles’ work re-ignited your interest in Morocco, expatriate life, and Tangier of the 1950's; specifically its art scene of expatriates such as Bowles, Bacon, and Burroughs, all of which was compounded by the summer heat, a foray into surfing, a firm grip on the penjamin (or its firm grip on you) and finding a copy of the Olympia Press Reader on Instagram for $10, where you read excerpts of Naked Lunch on your porch and tried to but couldn't even pretend to understand it, until you fell asleep, could no longer find the time, and then everything was lost, buried in the relentless tides of the TBR)

coyly following each other around in that circumlocutionary way you do at first whenever you get together, linking and separating. She likes Byron and Khalil Gibran and her favorite book is The Shining. At the horror section in the back you read to her from Hearts in Atlantis that part which you'd discovered just days shy of Spain and a life that felt outside of your own, returning home to What Now? and retreating into books like always, that part you read above the sheets in bed by lamp light from the title novella that solidified (once again) the power of literature, of romance, and of King's ability, his vision, and his position as a major writer in American letters and of the world, that part that sent you on a Platters kick and briefly into playing hearts, but most of all left you with a yearning to share those words, as intimate as they were, with someone as intimate, intimately, to the cadence of the those sentences. She found a copy of The Prophet and bought it for you, inscribing it _ _ _.

There were mornings She'd come over, and when She left you wished She never came in the first place so you didn't have to feel the emptiness, the vacuum of space She leaves behind.

You saw Her in the city last week, and two weeks before that when you were there applying for jobs and going on interviews, but as always on the train ride home your efforts felt stale and futile and it probably wouldn't have made a difference if you just called or emailed from home and saved money on the fare. A few times you ended up in basements and underground corridors in buildings that you thought were new or looked new but only made you realize or accept just how old New York really is. Cement steps and high walls and ceilings that crowded narrow passageways were like being inside an abbey, and a manager or maître d or cook would lead you down in search of someone to pass you off to, someone who may or may not want to hire you or give you what you want.

It's so easy to be with Her, to talk with Her, it's scary. It's always been like this, even as the distance between you gets wider (metaphorically) and after awhile being around each other gets to feeling how Marie Curie's hands looked. This time you met at a cafe and went back to Her place and then went out for dinner. The conversation got political and soon took a nasty turn with an undertone of boredom and annoyance seeping in, and it felt like at some point she decided that you were just an(other) ignorant asshole and that all the failures of your character summed up to this incredible lapse, this gulf, in your rationale and ideology, Her judgement of you so resolute and tangible, that when you finally answered Her in exasperation the topic fell moot like a dead bird off of a power line, and then you both walked back to Her place and she went straight to the bedroom, stripping off Her clothes, and you stood in the kitchen silently drinking it in until you grabbed your bag and announced you were leaving. It hardly phased Her, who squeaked out a "Yeah" as the door closed behind you and you walked down the stairs and out onto the street. When she called you the next day to say that it felt like something had broken, you only had to listen to the silence that followed to know she was right.