and the shaping of it, of him, of you, leaves you wretched, makes him cringe. how can i be this way, how can he fail like this over and over? how do you do it, day in, day out? does he feel no shame?
his daughter in your arms, you child, my child, i’m broken my little girl, he’s still trying to figure out how to be. do you want him to? do you really know how to live? can you fix him?

come back to it.
come back to the bleeding? no, no thanks.
no, come back to this.
i don’t think so. i don’t think i can anymore.
why?
because all writing is desire, it is longing, it wishing for things that are not there.
so?
so? and there’s too much here. there’s too much here to abandon and there’s nothing to want.
there’s nothing missing?
no, there isn’t. there’s simply too much living to be done.
that’s horseshit.
no, it is-
it’s utter horseshit and you know it. you’re undisciplined and lazy and afraid. cut the bullshit out and come back to the fold.

this echo within me, of something else, somewhere else, someone else. the ebb and flow of it, haunting, so close and yet so far. who was i, who am i, can i stand to be what i will become?
for years i’ve shed off one thing after another, stripped myself off in pieces dangled by skeletal fingertips, bare and cracked.
somewhere along the way i died and was reborn. and this new skin is hard to come by, treacherous to wear, but i have no other.

the passion of you, this bright smile, this wonder, you embody joy and innocence in a way that they write about in books.
you’ve turned two and it’s as if i have seen you for the first time. the last couple of years have been difficult for us as a family and i hope, with all my heart, that in the same way you forget your pacifier when we’ve secretly taken it away from you, these dark years eventually are forgotten as well.

where to begin, is always the first question. but the second?
where have you been. no, where have i been.
living, the little boy in the dark says to me, you’ve been living.
unhappy with yourself, racked with guilt, but living nonetheless.
he then adds, it’s not where to begin anymore.
it’s, where do you go now?

again and again, a return and a departure. the feeling is weak, so little to say, a loss of place, perhaps too preoccupied with being here, staying here. ach, nothing to worry about, only pining.

today the trifecta: daughter throwing up through most of the night, the main sewer line backed up into the slop sink in the morning, the car wouldn’t start. by evening, cleared the sewer line, daughter was better, car most likely needs a new starter. at the very least it looks like the refinance thing is going to happen.
bad things in threes, one glimmer of hope.

It is a certain kind of magic: someone walks up to you and asks the right question. How did they know to ask? A woman approached me after a writing workshop. It was the first time I had ever been there. We were prompted to write something. What I wrote sounded like the beginning of a thriller. The woman who approached me asked a question about how her writing was influencing her. That what she was writing was very personal and depressing, she asked me how to work through that. Why did she ask me? What was it about what I wrote that told her that I understood that kind of writing? How did she know?

Waking up with a tune in my head I don’t want to hear anymore, dry cough and the shiver of a dying winter bullying its way through the house. This house, our house, will we keep it in the end? Plans to ditch the 401k for now, give yourself that raise only because we have to dig ourselves out of this somehow. After all, we weren’t planning on retiring in our forties now were we?

One more for the road, for old time’s sake, one more to close out the day. Something that woody allen said about philip glass: you can tell him you don’t like it and he says ok and will just throw it away. And you like that don’t you, the idea of prolificness, the idea that you have this ability to riff off of anything, that you can spin any mad set of words out of nothing and keep doing it for days.
Well obviously this will be a test of that.