Whole days and nights will pass as I open these doors and close them again. Time changes. Even without windows or a view of the world I know that the sun somewhere is rising and setting, and that the moon shows more and then less of its face.

I will grow weak and tired. My clothes will fall from the bones and angles of my body like I just hung them out to dry.

And as my strength fails, I know finally that there is no end to it, no escape, and that all I can do is choose or keep searching.

And the next door moves just before I can touch it, opened from the other side by a gust of air. By something I can’t see.

This is my door. I know it without question.

I go through.

And when it happens, I don’t feel it. I never feel it. I just sleep. And they wash away, the things I’ve held on to, all of them. I let them go, leave them unchanged, and they are clean and new and nothing and then I am back. Never the same place—sometimes the cut and pulse of human traffic, sometimes a vast empty space. Anywhere and Always. The hot bite of dust, a blanket of snow. Soft opening of a morning or deep, sharp night. Sometimes before Now, and during, and also after, just the land holding bodies and the birds rising up over the sea. Square one, in all its different disguises. Always moving. Always alone.

I never forget what I am looking for, over and over, somewhere in that black-hole sleep. The one that keeps me. The one I can keep. My hook. A face at a window, the air in a bubble, a bird in a cage. Consequence. Purpose. Belonging. Your feet in the grass, Jude. Your face at a window. Your hands, your mouth, your smile.

A street. Here. Now.

Will it be this time? Will it be never? I will know my name and my age, my own hands, all my histories, same as ever. Quiet facts come to me like old finger drawings on glass, only traces. These trees. This house. This beginning. I stand at the side of the road, taking it all in, hoping and hoping. And I wonder, not for the first time, if it has some kind of start, this life, and who’s controlling it, and if it is ever, ever going to stop.

I will remember everything. I will write it down in my memory and keep it. And then I will sit, unnoticed, pretending not to wait.

Acknowledgments

THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU to

Rachel Denwood, Veronique Baxter, and Liza Kaplan

Chrissy Philp

And Gabrielle Walker, who read way too many uncooked versions, and is still talking to me anyway.

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