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Loss

What has gone? How it ends? Begin to forget it. I will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. Forget, remember!

--Joyce, Finnegans Wake

She sings, I am mute. When will my spring come? When shall I become like the swallow, that I may cease to be voiceless? I have lost my Muse through being voiceless, and Phoebus regards me not: so did Amyclae, through being voiceless, perish by its very silence.

--Pervigilium Veneris

I will not say I am what I am because of you. But, I am inclined to this exaggeration.

--Kafka, Letter to His Father

I.

• I saw her, I think, inside a Mexican restaurant I knew she would love.
• Slowly I'm able to listen to more and more of her music.
• Past-lives regression, age eighteen.
• There's a story about the dobermans and the pregnant neighbor lady.
• Pain attracts more than any other quality.
• Spring. On a garage-sale couch before a fireplace with no fire, in a home of college students on a budget, late at night after a party.
• After our first kiss she said, with a sweet, sweet sigh...
• There was a night when she glowed in the dark.
• We made love once in the kitchen of her parents' house.
• "I'll bet he's a Communist..."
• Young woman, blond, gray-eyed, roundish.
• Parting gifts. We gave each other earrings...
• She was famous before anyone met her.
• The twentieth anniversary is approaching of one of the worst things I've ever done.
• She said, "I don't like this... I don't like this."
• She manipulated me into meeting her in New York City.
• Interlude.
• Lovely young woman, blond, shy smile, sad gray eyes, seated across from you at a restaurant table.
• Black felt pen.
• I asked her once, "Why'd we break up?"
• Her best friend tells you, "You have a spiritual thing about her."
• You have to be careful not to fall into your fantasies.
• Told her boyfriend about me, finally.
• He tells her, "I'm definitely one of the top ten most important music scene people in the City."
• All that fall she shared intimacies I had no desire to hear.
• As the sex got wilder I became more concerned.
• She said, "Don't trust me Mark."
• I had the "female" role in that relationship.
• Beach, evening.
• Was T. right to leave your life like that?
• Isn't she a closet dom?
• Suburban street of one-story tract homes. Thrum of rain on concrete.
• "You want me to send a letter or a note / I w-w-w-w-w-w-won't!"
• Sketch: John.
• I have no inner sense of the passage of time.
• Tall boy with unkempt hair, slumped to the floor where he's fallen off the couch.
• Amtrack station.

II.

• Homeless.
• Black curtains, black towels, black sheets...
• City busses, subway trains. Motion and mass.
• Smoke. Black, gray, white.
• 2:06 a.m. Jerked awake in a strange bed in a strange city, disoriented in a dark room with bay windows and a tall ceiling.
• It's like a scene from Kafka:
• Her sister's apartment.
• Tall boy, sleepless, walks at dawn into a donut store on Haight Street.
• Free clinic.
• Her sister's apartment.
• I asked her friend once, "How can you watch her poison herself and not intervene?"
• I saw him on the bus one morning with a teenage girl in braces.
• They put you in a group for bereaved persons.
• Pretty girl in the farmer's market.
• Paralysis.
• Her eyes held that unmistakable soul-pain, that combination of loss and humiliation and anger that goes deep as bone and blood.
• You could put it this way, and it would be reasonably right.
• At a concert one night she walked up to a girl I knew and said, "Hi, I'm ---."
• Afterwards her sister called.
• The rumor mill said, her previous lover, the rock band manager who'd manipulated her with promises, had beaten up her current lover...
• Spring. Tall boy runs up zig-zag stairs, arrives breathless and laughing.
• Still at the root of this listlessness lies ---: ---, always and forever.
• Her sister came to visit, stood staring nearsighted at the pictures on my desk.
• And of course it's night, and all you can think of is her.
• With her sister at the aquarium.
• Sad, eaten away.

III.

• How do people heal?
• Inside the envelope:
• "Things would be different if I were king..."
• I went through my closets, throwing away the clothes she'd given me.
• People say, "Get over it!," and you reply, "OK. How?"
• White sand beach beneath an otherworldly canopy of vibrant blue and gold and purple stars.
• I miss my friends from before she came into my life.
• Her picture with her sister.
• The experience changed me fundamentally.
• The day after Judgement Day.

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This writing is fiction. Please don't confuse it with reality.
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