In the winter we sat nestled together beneath blankets and brandy,
watching the icicles for and we watched, just as each of us, the year cool and close
and creep back inside of itself. The snow fell, covering the green, darkening the
greys with its brightness and softening the world with its transient persistence.
In the summer I boarded the train with a new passport to feel warmth of the same sun through
different atmospheres. A bag and a book and the promise new things I had not seen, and
would not come to know then, followed me in my solitude. The cigarettes would speak to
of loneliness through my linen pocket and the matches spoke of autonomy.
In the fall I sat at a cafe positing the possibility of returning home to see what had
occured and people i had missed. The world turns and as I write in lampglow they lay in the sun.
To return, too, is a movement forward. To fill a page with words with a head full of wine and
a lung full of smoke is a thing as natural as breathing. . . .I will not eat with other men nor women,
and to keep my disjointed thought to myself I will go all the way back.
In the spring i went back, as far as I could remember, back to the burning hills and the acrid live oaks
thirsting in the valleys. The people i had know there had fled or burnt away and back at the beginning,
as in the end, I was alone.

