Hares in the open.

From every moment of exchange we leave each other with baskets of impression amidst our empty cases of expression. We have these weights hanging about us as we rub about one another.

After one of those moments, while walking my dog home on a late afternoon is a woman with random, useless objects like signs and old license plates for sale on her front yard. And she beckons and calls me to come over to purchase things, and asks me whereabouts I live. Oh, over on Oliver Street, I say, next to Alice Street, and yes, it is a very storied neighbourhood I have moved to, you're quite right. She asks me what I am studying at school and then returns my answer with that blank face: her features seeming to all gather towards the center, mouth closing and eyes changing to give that usual reaction that makes you realize your tedious description has gone farther than they wanted despite the fact that they asked. Then she asks me, with a bit of a titter, if I am gay--well, no, and what made you think so? What does a gay person look like, anyway? My shirt, with the top button undone. My glasses, which I have still been getting used to myself, and am now standing a few steps back in that process. I ready myself to step away and to bid her a pleasant evening, but she preemptively blurts out how frank she is, how she is just very frank, which had made her lonely in China and lonely here, too, when she moved from there years before now. And how this frankness was also given example by asking a lover if he was going to kill her while he was angrily driving out into the night's countryside long ago, after she learned firsthand that he was involved with another woman. Now she is very afraid and very hurt, for she is forbidden to even knock on his door.

Here I am thinking now of the ways that people attempt to drive straight through moments of discomfort which they have produced by papering over it with their own deep and personal objects for discussion. As if to stamp out that ruddy grey distaste that flickers and is brought out in the other person, to accede and peel themselves in ways explicit and sweet rather than implicitly deleterious. The way people make jokes about themselves after giving insult or tell these secret wrinkles to ones who in any other conversation might have left with only a basket of hi-how-are-you's. What I am thinking now is an unfinished thought, but, as with our Danish prince, there's the rub.