Roxanne

Greetings from the continent. Another day, another dollar, another big city. Sometimes I feel I have very little to report — this quarter no-one has died or lied or been set aside. So when my beautician asks what's new all I can talk about is my grandfather's health. (Declining by the way. He pulls himself from room to room like his body is a bag of heavy bones. He's thin and frail and old. His spine is curved like the middle part of a treble clef. He sits on the sofa waiting for Death, but Death seems too busy doing other things, visiting more important people.) The nothingness of everyday life, my Nothing To Report, is a product of a beige middle-class lottery win: your life is empty and painless and, baby, nothing hurts.

But the themes of this year keep coming up and down like waves: life and death and life and death. Life is next on the cycle. This week I've written some long and drunken thank you notes to men I knew for fifteen minutes — extended post-it notes of gratitudes: thanks for the dinner, the sex, and the punch in the heart. Now never call again. Now never think of me again. Now drop me off the cliff in the back of your mind, and I'll happily fall. (Trust me, that was Rapunzel's secret wish.)

Change of plan: I'm lying. Things have hurt. I have been around people who have opened me up like I'm ready for my wake. He stands over me and stares at me and tells me, "not just yet." I need just another fifteen minutes with someone I love, someone I didn't mean to love. So I think of him all the time. And as thirty days roll in and out (and in and out), the days of thinking, "is this all there is?" dissipate. Instead I pause and think, "maybe this is enough." 

(I keep writing my own obituary.)