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.

A firm conclusion.

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No art to find the mind's.

Near the bus stop I wait at, about a block or two away, is a tall apartment rise being built. I was thinking, watching the people drive their cars past, wondering about all things. And I heard a shout call through the air--"Where's your hard hat?" I looked up to that building and saw one man standing atop it and large against the sky. And I thought, maybe he is talking to me.

Is silence not quenching.

Today, while out walking about the neighbourhood blocks, I approached a couple arguing loudly on the sidewalk ahead. I tried to step around them, but as I did the woman grabbed a package of cigarettes from the man and threw it at me. I caught it, but when I started to ask to give them back, she told me to shut up, and to tell her boyfriend to shut up too, why don't I. But I didn't do that, and instead I turned and kept walking. So, that has been my day.

You are still at Anthony's temptation.

Outside for a moment so that we can take a break from dancing, really dancing, and in the cold and close quiet of the street we are approached by a few young men who have also just exited. They ask, Hey, do you guys have some dru? We do not know what that is, but it turns out that it is weed, and we do not have any. They say, that's okay, but man, I just want some, and how's your nights going? Ours are great. And then she asks of them, or of the one still talking to us how his New Year's Eve was, and did he get to kiss his truest love? No, no way. He said, I'm too young for that. And on the walk back to the car I thought how absolutely opposite, while thinking over the last ten years of my own life, or really, even the last fifteen or something like that, and how absurd to be sure of yourself that you are too young for love. He said he was too young, and that he is young, he wants to live life. I thought of myself, and then thought, does he not ever think that he is actually missing life, is that not what life is? That has been mine, surely, it has been life. But then as the car went I thought, well, you know, maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Standing there on a chair.

The last time I was in a hospital was to kiss my brand new nephew, his soft hands curled while he started his world in a small maternity ward, lit with primary colours. The time before that was with Evan, where we spent the night in the waiting room. He lay on the floor, his body curled in a wish to fold in his pain. After about seven or eight hours, he was at last let into observance only a short while before the sun came up. I spent the night sitting still in a plastic chair until an unimaginably cheerful morning news program came on the television at four o'clock or so. I share a commonly held distaste for hospitals, with their wishful sterilization of the real parts of a person, the blood and abject leaks and breath. And there is always a clutter along every hallway, of carts and basins, and machines, poles of barely indentifiable occupations that sit beneath poor, pastel coloured landscape paintings. Somewhere in the anaesthetized bowels of a hospital, probably behind doors and doors, where paintings are no longer hung, lay my mother. I always think about what people must be thinking in hospitals. I wonder about the approach of despair that comes out of the pain of their bodies, of their awareness of something broken about themselves beneath their bandages or swimming within their mysterious flesh. I do not think that the stiff sanitary can keep away these thoughts when one closes their eyes.