everything in my life is a lie.

i earned the nickname ‘fortune cookie’ my first year of college because more often than not, if something significant happened to someone in our group, i’d written about it about it a few weeks earlier. they used to make bets on it. quarter bets. can of soda bets. i-told-you-so bets. but bets nonetheless.

demeaning, as nicknames go.

also true.

thing is: if i’ve ever done it to you, i’ve done it to myself three thousand times worse.

my intuition has face-slammed me more times than i can count. has it ever been helpful? not that i can shut it down, not that i would shut it down if i were able. not even after this. but here's a hard lesson: apparently, the mechanisms of an unimaginable loss seems to mean the denial part of the grieving process begins with the intuiting.

no that's not what that means.
no that couldn't be what that means.
that's not what it means at all.

śarīra

in my nightshirt well after three i finally forced myself take a shower and, after that, in my robe, i wandered around our two bedroom apartment for the better part of an hour. i didn't understand that i was doing it. i just did. walking out of one room and into another. pretending to have a purpose, i'd walk purposefully over to the kitchen cabinets. then i'd think, i could go into the study, so i'd go into the study and stare at the circle tapestry on the wall behind the computer. staring at that, something else would occur to me so i'd walk to the bedroom and poke at the dresser for a while until what happened closed in around me again and i sat on the floor. i guess that's what i was doing. trying to keep it from closing in around me again. it already is, closed in tight, but what else am i going to do?

i sat on the floor in the bedroom. maybe this is past the point where i promised ben i'd call him if it seemed like it was getting to this point, i think, and stand up, meaning to walk to the telephone on his nightstand. instead i wandered back into the front room and stared out the window at the broadcast towers. thirty years thirty years thirty years. this fixture in my landscape. more than that. elements of my landscape itself. i wouldn't have kept writing without you. i might not have started writing without you. i might've killed myself that summer before high school without you and now and now and what. and the broadcast towers blinked, like they do. sending out their signal, like they do. and i watched them or i pretended i could watch them and that's it. that's fucking it. and neither of us is even forty. and neither of us is even forty. and neither of us was even forty.

then i thought, he'll never know about

i sat back down on the floor.

*

who am i without your anchor?