Emblazoned.

There is a second gunman.

Winking in the dark.

"After that kind of night, that company, I was stopping off at the convenience store for a chocolate bar, because after all of it there is nothing else to want and to be had. What kind, well, it was a Caramilk, the best to take your time with, it's true. Well, there was a lineup at the store. Three people in a row were buying gum, and a woman was behind me picking up a bag of chips. She was in a jogging outfit, so maybe she was cheating on her regime, or maybe she was giving herself a gift. Either way, any person deserves that. I had to get to the market, and asked the store clerk if he knew where it was from here. He shrugged, but the woman with the chips told me, 'Keep down this street three blocks, turn left and keep going, you can't miss it.' 'Okay, thanks,' I said, 'Thank you. Your backpack is open, by the way.'"

An electrical gadget on the edge of the tub.

Yesterday did not appear the type where riots would later break out in some distant suburban neighbourhood by bored university students on an Irish holiday. I was reading on the porch in the sun, with all the drinks, and was listening to someone who I could not see while they played every song they knew on their acoustic guitar. A woman with the type and figure of Anjelica Huston, though with charred golden hair, strolled with her air around the corner. She wore black, with heavy earrings and makeup, had a wide black hat on, and she carried a colourful goblet with lightness. She asked, do I know where that guitar is coming from? And then stepped past me, beyond the corner of the house and into my backyard. When she came back, she asked me again, and then told me some things about myself. She took two sips from her goblet, turned, and drifted past the next house and into its backyard.

Some bantering grace.

These first days when the weather warms give shocks to a person's body, so that everyone in this city wanders with enthusiasm. And I took my boy pup out to get some ice cream. When on our way home along the sidewalk, two elders were rolling past each other on their scooters, and the old man tipped his hat at the woman, winked, and said, "Good afternoon, darling." And the old woman gave that confident little laugh that young girls first learn when they notice how capable they are of manipulating boys. She gave that laugh, and said, "Don't you get fresh, sir."

No less than the journey-work.

Back to the places I grew up, where my family still lives, and where I went to elementary and then high school, where I went to church, I think to what the community must have been like when my grandparents were young. The world has not changed much there, I know. These were young immigrants, a family of brothers who crossed an ocean to work their small farms together. What was it, in that long move, which made them choose this place over any other? Location has always felt to me like a most anxious opportunity. I think about how I am someone who sits still and thinks too much, while they in their activities spent their time in simple joy. An every day happiness in working a small farm with their brothers and their wives, young families with their children scurrying behind them across great yards, dogs chasing through burrs, all shielded from the coming history that would succeed them. There are parts of those lives that I have had in my own. The sun, and the stick of grass to the sweat of forearms beneath a loose cotton shirt. In my own life, I am already long past the years when those families took a name, when their farms were built and when they would take turns to wake and work at each brother's farm to gather the food they helped to grow. When I look at my hands I see the years in them, and in the way that my grandfather and his brothers would hold in their hard hands their young children, now the ones who come to me, now on my own arms, and in the way I feel the morning.

Made some marmalade.

Here is a story that is not true, not even a little bit.

I have been having conversations with someone lately, sometimes letter exchanges, about the loss of love. We are sharing our own thoughts about just what happened and hoping to give the other advice, each in our own situations, comparing and differing, sifting and seeking what we might offer the other. Because we have these messes, ones that we thought were not nearly so large as love, but that somehow the other half did not see enough to pass. Not the kinds of messes like cheating on a partner, but also not the kinds like "I hate the way you chew your food," not anything like that. Nothing like either of those things, but somehow, you know. The messes are torrents. And we have been attempting to aid each other in understanding how a mess has somehow initiated the kind of purposeful insensitivity you would not think possible in that other person, the kind that either freezes or just dissolves all else.

This person asks me how I move forward. Moving forward is a well to draw. And I have a whole list of things to offer, a guide that I imagine a person could follow. I would suggest to stop making the kinds of meals you would love together. Big salads with hot, fried tofu, cheesy honey eggs, halibut. Certain chocolates. Do not make the kinds of foods that you know from them, it is as if eating your own sorrow. Do not listen to the pop songs you danced to at their house. More, do not pin their picture of a nose to the walls of your new house, or turn in your hands a note they left you when they visited your cafe years ago, nor every other note you have kept. And do not listen to your own thoughts when you are driving through the night, when what you feel in the air of the car is the way you would kiss their fingers when they were your passenger. But do not let your work sit, or decline your friends. Make yourself make things. Throw your soul back into the air.

Take your walks. These things looked a cinematic montage where a person would reorder themselves. A long while ago I read a book called Surprised By Joy, something that I took to out of the wake of the loss of my Great Uncle Herman. The context of the book is different from his death, of course, but the thoughts there gave me myself. They were not suggesting for one to remake the way they position themselves in the world, only to see what that world actually is in truth. And I let it try me again this time, but could find nothing. None of the things I thought were true, for it is that very truth, a kernel, carbon, pressed and magnetized and not something I have been able to approach any longer. I would not write these things though, not for a person who needs the opposite. Elsewhere than for this one whom I was having these exchanges with, I would write of the slow realization that, despite your insistence on the truth you saw, despite yourself, when you drag through your own sands, you see that every time you came between you and that person, that person put someone else between you and them. There is no advice to give when what is being forced upon you is the way that truth lacks in your world, no matter how you may perceive its conception. But I would not say this. Neither would I offer those items of optimism, that wholesome guide. Sometimes realism needs a magic in between. I would say, then, only if you really want to, make yourself breakfast for every meal, because why not. When you wake up in the dark, keep with your coffee and Cat Stevens while you watch out your window as the world grows grey with light. Listen, still.