She has a cute face.

         it's like, with all the bass booming from subwoofers across intersections, even windows down and arms out it's hard to think sometimes. I've always taken solace in other people's words and then my own, kind of an even tradeoff, in a way, and maybe I've never really respected Kenny Rogers as an artist, but he's telling me in the 90-degree heat that I've got to know when to hold 'em. And I think I do.

         When I was fifteen, I was terrified of spiders. I would dance on the rubber toes of my shoes like a ballerina to avoid them, pierouetting into walls and leap-frogging across entire rooms in escape, but every once in a while we'd be trapped together. One night, I stood in the bathroom and a little one of them, kind of the size of my smallest finger, worked its way to the ceiling and just as it reached it, fell all the way back to the floor. I was watching. My eyes were the size sheep's are, when they enter the plastic hanging flaps of the slaughterhouse. They were the size of the trunks of baobab trees that drink in water for years, to store for drought.

         Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing, but I just can't now. I'll count my money when the dealing's done but it isn't finished. I spend my days pouring water into other people's glasses, cleaning up their smiles as they fall onto table linens I bunch into fabric bags, snapping into action at the plate-clinking of steak knives. I throw garland around table fluff and polish forks in steaming pitchers of water, and in every muted reflection, somewhere, I'm finding myself. In Lost in Translation, Bob tells Charlotte that, "The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you." Today, taking strong silent strides across the hall floor, I felt my heart sink down into my abdomen, a little broken, a little smashed, maybe, but when Alfred looked at me, and this woman mentoring a science achiever, and Virise hovering coffee-laden above table eleven, I autocorrected or something. I think it probably helps you when you stand up straight.

         One day, I want to bike across the country when I'm old and leave pieces of my bones in all the places I've always wanted to visit. Arcaheologists with nothing to do will stumble upon them in Appalachia and the corn belt and use them for their science projects, to win fairs with.

I'll say, hey, to my comrades with broken hips,
I don't have any!



See, the moral of the story is,
you can't break something you've lost.
         I think I shall be heartless for a while. Frank Sinatra left his heart in San Francisco, and San Francisco kept it safe there until he came back to it.

I'm leaving mine in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
You can go spelunking there to visit it, if you like.