I was halfway back up but she kept getting snagged on this deepest crater, on the less cratered side but the side I hadn’t lain the lone plywood plank I owned over, spraying out mud onto the tree.

Wasn’t till a neighbor across the one-way back there saw me skidding out and ran up with a second piece of plywood, handing it to me like Take it, no questions asked, that I managed to get her up.

I tried to return it to her after—it was snapped down the center, barely hanging together, chipped wood-shards sticking out either side. But she just smiled at me from the fold-out chair she was posted on. Said No, that’s all you and not realizing till then that you could just move natural materials around like that, to accommodate your needs, provided you had the horsepower to.

Back in my backyard, I hopped up into the back of the box how J had been right and later that night, at almost midnight, the clouds did break. Opened both the back swing-out and side sliding doors, the windows on either side.

Dusted off my baby-blue Brother manual typewriter I copped in Oakland, the year ex bae and I lived together in Oakland me almost KO’d in the box, in my sleeping bag, tryna decipher, through the spliffs, by candlelight, what Calvino was actually saying tho in Invisible Cities (1974) when J banged on the side sliding door and said Get geared, we gotta move. Placed it onto the now sun-facing desk and tried to resume writing Fuccboi.

It was almost noon us working all night poncho’d headlamped up chopping down and laying out on tarps as many plants as possible that hadn’t gotten so exhausted, soporific, that they’d dipped heads into the mud puddles pooling all over—

The sun had just cleared the top of the driveway-side tree, would descend below the peak of my apartment’s roof around 3.

Four hours of direct rays.

Of sitting crumpled on the step of my side doorway, or at my makeshift, roadside-found, table-leaf van-desk. As much skin as possible exposed. Shuddering nonstop from that sustained, full-body, solar orgasm.

Picking up writing Fuccboi where I’d left off—before my LA recovery stint, my hospital crash-out—felt impossible.

So much different now.

Everything changing always, too quickly to keep up with.

I’d been stalling, waiting, listening. But waiting too long. No longer in a positive, patient, edging-type way.

Only stalling.

Paralyzed.

Shook.

V had sent me a handwritten letter last week.

I had it laid out next to my Fuccboi pages on my van desk.

He’d been fucking with this witchy hippy girl in Santa Cruz he’d met at the lower westside New Leaf juice bar, while sliding in there to shit one morning. After a night sleeping in his Vanagon, by the tracks nearby.