And of course it comes as our vacation ends but buys us another day. However we are iced up, slick and treacherous. Bundled inside with children who are at once poignant and comical. My son’s gaze is open and pure, my daughter’s smile striking and innocent, my wife’s voice gentle and warm. Even in the thick of it, of financial woes and impending doom, I am a very, very rich man.

Little one, how did you get here?
You’ve gone from baby to toddler to child. I look at you and am amazed: you are contained, you are already your very own person: you think, you feel, you move. It is a very difficult thing to explain. You are a wonder, in many ways, you are a miracle of happenstance. Somehow you have arrived and are ready to go at the same time.
And here we are, lost in the dust you will surely leave behind.

Joris had said, years ago but it’s like yesterday, when they start getting it steady, that’s when the real writers emerge.
And I’ve always been haunted by that, struggling as I was, living with my future wife, that I was one of those, those that dabbled with writing because they were lonely, but then, then there are the moments that it spews out of me, some turn of phrase, some image, and it becomes some thing: foreign and beautiful and complete.

I’ve always had a penchant for turning away: it was after all the easiest thing in the world to do, a swivel of the hips, perhaps one last look, then gone.

I think I need to write with a certain kind of brutality: not necessarily honest, all writing is a lie from the onset. You claim that these series of letters represent some real thing “out there” when it doesn’t, but that can go on for days, where does gnosis happen, where does the world happen, how do we come to know it? Then that thing with sacks about the brain damage and the difference between the abstract and the concrete, the collage that makes us recognize and move in the world. I am all lateral thinking or is that associative? Anyways, the way at and through using a certain brutality. I am certainly not lyrical.

Sigh, non plussed. Blessed are the decorations. She cuts a mean mayonaise. And the harbor stands rickety like it was waiting. A cloudy judgement leads to prosecutors with bells. He sits on the bench and thinks of the zoo. Utterly complacent, the child makes figurines out of mushy rice. She asks, did you plan any of this? No, but I saw it coming.

Cracked brick, her mouth is in tethers. All this nonsense, he says, for one moment of hang time. I hid beneath the bed while she cried and he panted, you could not have remembered that. A chair in a room, leather bound, empty, and explicitly without use. She questions the shirt he has chosen to wear. He listens while dozing off but still manages something profound. Curled up into a ball, she laughs. And my son, while my son falls off high places and smiles like the dawn only belongs to him.

Sometimes exhaustion comes over me like water, the beckoning of sleep, a certain kind of filling, like almost forgiveness, a hollowing out of feeling, little room for anything else, simple and plain and welcoming.

Three piece suit ready to wear. Hair short cropped and nails trimmed. Clean shaven and a dash of cologne. A chill runs through me. How did it get like this? Snug knot and smooth sleeved. Waist slim and perfect crease down to polished shoes. It’s almost a glare. All this a facade for the truant within, the rags bundled but never forgotten. You all start from a place like this.