And of course what I do, he tells me he’s got work to do, let’s go down by the river, and so I’m sitting on the rocks and it doesn’t really rain after all and in Boulder I feel surrounded by something huge and protective. And I’m reading Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon, and he’s just the right amount of Dahl and O. Henry somehow, refreshing and unsettling and addictive and, and. I realize all he’s doing is drawing. Me. The night before, I brought him a book of Norse myths I found at work, knowing he’d get a kick out of the illustrations. He started reading it. I mean out loud. I hadn’t felt so calm in weeks, it was bound to end sometime, I was bound to wake up and walk out sometime.

Wasn’t I? I mean the thing I love about Sam is that we crash and burn at the same time. That I’m bursting laughing before I realize what I’m doing and “Oh god, I’m sorry, that’s not really funny. . . Shit, I’m sorry. It’s really not,” still suppressing giggles and he doesn’t even give a shit. That he should’ve been laughing at me and he didn’t.

So again. I fall into what loves me back via Thomas Moore’s The Style of Connectedness. Flip around GR, rediscover things I’ve got bookmarked. The only pencilmark that’s anywhere is an arrow, and all it’s doing is pointing to this one short paragraph:

>>Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is we will never know each other. Beaming, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and we’re strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.<<

What’s so special about this thing, anyway, that my dialogue with it’s outlasted four relationships. I’m starting to think it understands me better, on grounds of the one thing we have in common. I mean, it’s painstakingly open but so fucking convoluted you can’t even tell, for godsake and who has the patience. (Open it, speak it, the evening stars and the weight of all these histories.) I mean lies and wishes are the same thing and all it ever did was take me in and give me what I need.